You always have to host your own files or pay someone to host them for you, to guarantee some useful degree of availability. That cost is often minimal. For most non-commercial purposes, a raspberry pi on a home internet connection would probably be sufficient.

IPFS isn't a service to store unpopular files for you for free. If you're not going to do it, someone else has to be paid or otherwise motivated to host your files for you.

IPFS reduces bandwidth costs, and might reduce latency, in the event your files/data become popular. In a sense, it's a free content-addressable autoscaling cdn. It's not a free S3/B2 replacement.