No, I plan to pay for the storage. I was going to pay for the VPS anyway (which also would have meant paying for the storage). Friends can have a free account (5 GB storage free), and still have full access to the shared album I am hosting (via paid storage) it appears.

The plan isn't to just have a ente.io account that keeps growing, it would be to collect all photos from a few trips, take them offline to personal storage (and friends can save what they want) then delete it. But some paid storage will be needed in the interim.