2026-08-21
Discord’s free upload limit just doubled to 20MB (and how many seconds of video that actually buys you)
On August 13, 2026, Discord raised the file upload limit for free users from 10MB to 20MB — the first increase since it cut the cap from 25MB down to 10MB back in September 2024. If you share game clips or screen recordings on Discord without paying for Nitro, your budget just doubled. But 20MB is still not much video, and the more interesting question is the practical one: how many seconds of clip actually fit in it, and what do you do when yours doesn't? Here are the sourced numbers, some honest back-of-the-envelope math, and the trim-first workflow that gets a clip under the cap without uploading it to some compressor site along the way.
What changed on August 13
Dexerto's coverage of the announcement lays out the change: the free-tier cap went from 10MB to 20MB, and Discord also changed how the limit is checked on mobile — file size is now measured before compression instead of after, matching how desktop already worked. PCGamesN's report confirms the same numbers. The paid tiers didn't move: per Discord's own File Attachments FAQ, Nitro Basic stays at 50MB per upload and full Nitro at 500MB. And note what the new number is not: it's not a return to the old ceiling. 20MB is still below the 25MB free users had for about a year and a half before the 2024 cut.
How Discord got here: 8 → 25 → 10 → 20
The free cap has moved three times in as many years. Discord raised its longtime 8MB limit to 25MB in April 2023, then cut it to 10MB in September 2024 — Dexerto's report at the time quoted Discord's reasoning that "storage management is expensive" and its claim that 99% of users were uploading files smaller than 10MB anyway. The August 2026 change walks half of that cut back. (Our earlier post on GitHub, Discord, and Slack GIF limits quoted the 10MB figure that was correct when it was written — this is the update.)
What 20MB actually holds, in seconds
File size for encoded video is, to a first approximation, bitrate × duration. NearVid's WebM export uses three fixed quality presets — 2Mbps video for High, 1Mbps for Medium, 500kbps for Low, plus roughly 128kbps of audio — and those are the exact numbers behind the little "≈" size estimate the export screen shows before you encode anything. Run them against a 20MB budget and you get: roughly 75 seconds at High, roughly 2 minutes 20 seconds at Medium, and a bit over 4 minutes at Low. The browser-native MP4 path uses its own presets (4Mbps/2Mbps/800kbps), so MP4 at High fits only about 40 seconds, while Low stretches to just under 3 minutes. Treat every one of those figures the way NearVid's own UI treats them — as a labeled approximation, not a promise. The real encoder spends bits based on what's in the frame, so a static-screen tutorial comes in under the estimate and a frantic 200fps shooter clip can land over it.
The workflow: trim to the moment first, then pick a preset that fits
The math above points at the same lever our GIF-limits post did: duration is the biggest input to file size, so cut footage before touching quality settings. NearVid's Trim is a lossless stream copy — no re-encode, no quality loss, done in well under a second for most files — so cutting a five-minute recording down to the fifteen seconds where the thing actually happens is free, and usually gets a clip under 20MB on its own with the original quality fully intact. If the trimmed clip is still too big, convert it: pick Convert to WebM, set the same start/end range, and choose the quality preset whose "≈" estimate lands under 20MB before you sit through an encode. On Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers, a feature-detected Convert to MP4 card offers the same flow with H.264+AAC output. Every step runs on your device, in the browser tab — the clip never uploads anywhere until you drop the finished file into Discord yourself. One practical note on the mobile measurement change: since Discord now checks the file's size before any compression it might apply, the size your file manager shows — and the size NearVid's estimate is approximating — is exactly the number that has to clear the cap.
What NearVid doesn't do here
Same honesty as before: NearVid doesn't know Discord's caps and has no "make this exactly 20MB" button — no auto-bitrate targeting, no byte-count slider. You trim, pick a preset, read the estimate, and check the finished file's actual size before posting. And if what you want to share genuinely is a full match VOD rather than a clip, no preset math rescues that inside 20MB at watchable quality — that's what Nitro's 500MB tier, or just uploading to a video platform and pasting the link, is for.
The honest summary
As of August 13, 2026, Discord's free upload cap is 20MB — doubled from 10MB, still below the 25MB it briefly was before September 2024, with Nitro Basic and Nitro unchanged at 50MB and 500MB per Discord's own FAQ. At NearVid's real preset bitrates, that budget holds roughly a minute and a quarter of High-quality WebM, or a bit over four minutes at Low — estimates, not guarantees. The reliable way in stays the same as it was under 10MB: trim losslessly to just the seconds that matter, and only then re-encode, with the "≈" estimate telling you which preset fits before you spend time encoding — all of it on your own device.