💾 128GB felt tight last time, thinking 256GB this round

My phone has 128GB and for the last 2 months it keeps telling me storage is almost full. Always at the worst possible time, like a bad joke. Last week I was at a wedding trying to record a video. The phone stopped halfway and showed me a red message, and my cousin's whole entry went missing. I stood there deleting old apps with the music playing and 6 people watching me. It's not one big thing. I don't shoot much video and I'm not into heavy games. It's apps getting bigger with every update, plus cached stuff, plus photos I forget I took. I push older photos to the cloud already, but the free space still feels smaller each year. Even the WhatsApp folder from 2 years of group forwards is bigger than I'd like to admit. Now I'm buying a new phone and the shop has both 128GB and 256GB models. The price gap isn't huge, a few thousand rupees depending on the model. Part of me says take the bigger one and never think about it again. The other part says don't pay for space you won't use, just clean up better and be disciplined. I keep my phones for about 3 years, so I'm leaning towards 256GB. But I'd like to hear from people who've had 256GB for a while. Did you fill it? Or is it just a comfortable cushion that never gets close to full? I'll probably buy the bigger one, but tell me if I'm wasting money.

Have had 256GB for about two years now and never came close to filling it even with a fairly large camera roll and a decent number of installed apps. That said I do use cloud storage for older photos same as you, so the extra space mostly just removes the anxiety of getting close to full rather than being strictly necessary day to day.

I'd pick 256GB if you plan to keep this one 3 years or longer.