Local photo triage beats a recurring cloud bill, but the app only covers the easy cases for free; video and collection cleanup cost $3.49, and the OS already has tools that do the heavy lifting.
Every Android phone hits the same wall. You pull out the phone to snap something, and the camera app tells you storage is full. The default escape is a cloud storage subscription that quietly renews month after month.
The cheaper path is local triage: a few minutes of decisions, not an afternoon of hunting, and a workflow that runs in any gallery app. The ZDNET recommendation piece on Sponge — Gallery Cleaner by Jack Wallen describes the app as exponentially faster than the Google Photos deletion workflow, based on Wallen's own use on a Pixel 9 Pro. The more useful frame is that the workflow itself does the work. Sort by largest, sort by oldest, kill bursts and screenshots, keep the irreplaceable. Sponge is a wrapper around a set of decisions the reader has to make anyway.
Several trade-offs sit underneath the "free" headline. Sponge's free tier covers photo deletion only, organized by month — video deletion and collection cleanup require a $3.49 one-time Premium upgrade. That split is technically true and practically important for the cases that take the most space. Sponge only deletes from the local device, never from Google Cloud, which means every deleted photo still exists in the reader's cloud backup if they have one. OS-bundled cleaners from Google already exist on most Android phones, and they tend to push aggressive deletion; the cited app competes on a friendlier interface, not a fundamentally different capability.
What local triage actually costs in time. Sort by largest items: video clips and burst-mode photo sets dominate. Sort by oldest: most of these have not been opened in two years. Kill screenshots older than a month, near-duplicate burst frames, and documents that have already been forwarded elsewhere. What is left is the irreplaceable: family photos, work documents, scanned receipts. That is the small set worth paying a cloud provider to back up, if you pay for cloud at all.
A reader who finishes this piece has a workflow, a clear-eyed view of what the free tier covers, and a backup recommendation to pair with it. They do not need to install anything to start. The ZDNET recommendation is one path into that workflow; the workflow itself runs in the gallery app already on the phone. Sponge is available free on Google Play.