@js@mstdn.io Do you mean only the backing sql database, or all storage altogether (incl. media and possibly some other sundry things)? Everything-but-database takes ~15GB for @delroth's single-user instance.
(Note that you can not cache any remote media at all; it will at most incur a delay when viewing that media.)
@robryk @js and my current postgres database for Mastodon is 35MB pg_dump gzip'd, 171MB on disk