I was doing a deep dive to understand what is happening with IPFS and Filecoin and how Filecoin uses IPFS in reality.

Saas and Pinata

The usual method to use IPFS is to upload files data on some centralized service like PInata, where you pay some $240 a year for the lowest plan to store some 20k files at this point. What they actually do for you is provide IPFS pinning service as in they are running IPFS nodes and pinning your data while you provide payments.

A similar service to Pinata is Lighthouse Storage where it also pins your data to their node and will also store them to filecoin for permanent storage.
Another similar solution is from Crust network and their cloud solution.
One more is Gateway3

Filecoin or/and IPFS

It is crucial to understand the difference between filecoin and IPFS and this excerpt should help.

So what this means is that IPFS is serving data filecoin is storing it but nativly they are not connected and storing files on Filecoin doesn’t mean they will be served on IPFS protocol or IPFS URI. This does change with this update from Filecoin and the introduction of Bitswap retrieval** **which is an interoperability mechanism for incentivization of storage providers on Filecoin to provide file retrieval over IPFS.