How Much Cloud Storage Is Actually Free, and What the Next Dollar Buys

A free cloud-storage allowance is useful only if it covers what you need to store. Compare the starting quota, what shares that quota, and the cost of the next suitable plan before moving files. Paying is one option when space runs out; reducing what you store or moving a verified copy elsewhere may also fit your needs. This is a comparison of published offers, not a hands-on storage or reliability test.

The table separates free allowances from paid upgrades. If you already know you need hundreds of gigabytes or more, use the paid storage comparison for annual cash outlay and encryption conditions. Here, the question is whether you need to pay at all, and how large the first upgrade would be.

How much cloud storage costs at the first paid step

Here are seven services, with the free allowance and what the cheapest paid personal plan costs. Each cell links to the vendor page it was read from.

Service	Free tier	Cheapest paid personal plan	Published price and billing basis
Google Drive (Google One)	15 GB, shared with Gmail and Photos	100 GB (Basic)	$1.99/mo (≈ $24/yr); annual billing is discounted
iCloud	5 GB	50 GB (iCloud+)	$0.99/mo (≈ $12/yr)
Dropbox	2 GB (Basic)	2 TB (Plus)	$119.88/year upfront ($9.99/month equivalent), or $11.99 billed monthly ($143.88 over 12 payments)
Microsoft OneDrive	5 GB	100 GB (Microsoft 365 Basic); 1 TB comes with Microsoft 365 Personal	$19.99/year upfront, or $1.99 billed monthly ($23.88 over 12 payments)
MEGA	20 GB	200 GB (Essential, annual only); next is 750 GB (Pro Lite)	€40/yr for Essential; €4.99/mo for Pro Lite, before VAT — billed in euros
pCloud	2 GB, up to 10 GB by completing tasks	500 GB (Premium)	$49.99/year for 500 GB; optional lifetime payment $219, a different commitment
Sync.com	5 GB	1 TB (Personal), lowest capacity on checked individual pricing page	First year: $108 billed annually, or $12/month; regular displayed rates: $144/year or $16/month; taxes may apply

Sync free allowance and individual pricing checked October 20, 2026. The page no longer lists the 150 GB/$42-a-year offer previously shown here. Its annual price is a monthly equivalent, not permission to pay monthly: $9 × 12 = $108 upfront for the promotional first year; the displayed regular annual rate is $12 × 12 = $144. Monthly billing is $12 during the first year and a displayed regular $16 afterward. Confirm eligibility and renewal at checkout. No purchase was made.

Microsoft Basic’s 100 GB capacity and US billing options checked October 21, 2026 on the linked OneDrive comparison page. Twelve $1.99 payments total $23.88; annual billing is $3.89 less but requires $19.99 upfront. The subscription renews unless canceled. Its separately listed mailbox allowance is not extra OneDrive file capacity. No checkout or purchase was tested.

Dropbox billing quotes were verified October 18 and pCloud’s annual/lifetime quotes October 19 for our linked paid comparison, and are reconciled here without claiming a new price check. Their free allowances retain the September 20 check. Google, Apple and MEGA rows also retain September 20: Apple was read directly; Google’s US price came from an official search excerpt; MEGA amounts came from the public plan feed used by its scripted page. MEGA’s pre-VAT euro figures are not comparable US-dollar quotes. Microsoft’s free allowance was supported by official search excerpts then. Confirm current eligibility, taxes and renewal terms before paying.

What the free column tells you

Capacity alone cannot tell you how long a free plan will last. A folder of documents and a video library can have very different needs, and there is no useful universal “one phone’s worth” estimate. Check your current usage and expected additions instead of assuming that 5 GB will be too small or 20 GB will be enough.

For a hypothetical account with 3 GB already stored and 0.5 GB of net additions each month, a 5 GB allowance leaves 2 GB of headroom: about four months at that unchanged rate. An upcoming 4 GB upload would exceed the allowance immediately. Use your own figures, include any email, photos or backups that share the quota, and leave room for the next large upload. This is planning arithmetic, not measured usage or a promise about a provider’s over-quota behavior.

The upgrade pressure is not evenly distributed, and this is the part pricing pages gloss over. iCloud’s 5 GB is shared across device backups, photos, messages and app data for the whole Apple account, so it is not “5 GB of files” in the clean way a folder is — it is the ceiling on everything a phone quietly sends to the cloud. Google’s 15 GB is shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos, which sounds generous until you realize your inbox and your photo library are both draining the same bucket. Sync.com’s free plan adds limits that are not about size at all: three password-protected links, three shared folders and 5 GB of monthly transfer. The number on the box is almost never the number you get to use.

What the pricing page leaves out is the shape of the accounts, not just the size of them. A comparison that only lists gigabytes is quietly lying to you, the same way the annual discount is often a loan disguised as a saving rather than a deal. You have to ask what the storage is for, and who gets to dip into it, before the number means anything. And once you are past the first paid tier, the comparison changes again: what a terabyte costs per year at 200 GB, 1 TB and 2 TB is a separate table, with an encryption column the free-tier comparison does not need.

The size of the first paid step is a pricing decision

The second thing the pricing page leaves out is what happens to the gap. Dropbox’s free tier is 2 GB but its cheapest personal plan jumps straight to 2 TB — there is no 100 GB step in between, so a person who just wants to move past 2 GB has to buy a thousand times more space than they have, at about $120 a year. The other steps differ: the older checks list 50 GB at Apple, 100 GB at Google and Microsoft, 200 GB at MEGA and 500 GB at pCloud. Sync’s October 20 individual page starts at 1 TB, so it no longer supports the earlier recommendation of a small 150 GB upgrade. Do not equate a low monthly-equivalent headline with a small upfront bill. The size of the first paid step is a pricing decision every bit as deliberate as the free tier, and it is rarely talked about head-on.

The way the money comes out differs as well. Dropbox shows its yearly-billed price by default, and MEGA’s cheapest plan cannot be bought monthly at all. Google and Apple default to a monthly dribble that is easy to forget and exactly the kind of recurring charge that adds up without a review. MEGA prices in euros, so for a US customer the dollar amount is a moving conversion target, with VAT added where it applies. pCloud is the outlier that sells a one-time lifetime payment alongside its subscriptions, which removes the recurring charge entirely but asks you to bet on a vendor a decade in advance — and its lifetime prices are shown as a discount from a struck-through list price, so treat the “sale” figure as the real price rather than a deadline.

Bonus storage is not the same as free storage

This is the most common way people get caught out by a free tier. MEGA’s free allowance is 20 GB, and its achievements program adds 5 GB each for installing the desktop app, installing a mobile app, inviting a friend, or starting a VPN or password-manager trial. Every one of those bonuses is “valid for 365 days”, and MEGA’s help centre is plain about what follows: when the bonus expires, the extra space is removed. An account that filled 35 GB on the strength of three bonuses is over quota a year later without having changed anything.

pCloud works the other way round. The account starts at 2 GB and reaches 10 GB only after the beginner tutorial and referrals — verify the email address, upload a file, install the desktop and mobile apps, and so on, a gigabyte at a time, with referrals capped at 3 GB. So “10 GB free” is a ceiling you work toward, not what the account holds on day one. The rule for both: plan around the permanent number (20 GB at MEGA, 2 GB at pCloud until you have done the tasks), not the headline.

Getting your files back out, and what happens when you stop paying

A folder visible on your desktop is not proof that every file is stored locally. Before leaving a service, distinguish a downloaded copy from an online-only placeholder and check for folders excluded from desktop sync.

Desktop service	What to check before copying	Official instructions
Dropbox	Include the required folders in selective sync, choose Make available offline, and wait for the solid green checkmark	Offline files and sync settings
OneDrive on Windows	Online-only files need an internet connection. Choose Always keep on this device for the required folders and let the download finish	Files On-Demand

Desktop download instructions checked October 20, 2026. This is a documentation check, not a completed export test; it does not reverify pricing or cancellation policies.

For a practical exit check, compare the folders in the web account with those selected on the computer, and allow enough disk space for both the download and a separate copy. After downloading, copy, rather than move, the files to a destination outside any synced folder, such as an external drive. Microsoft’s guide says moving files outside OneDrive removes them from OneDrive, and deleting a synced file also deletes it online. Keeping the downloaded files inside the sync folder alone is therefore not an independent archive.

Disconnect from the network and open representative files from the separate copy, including a large file and each important file type. Compare file counts and sizes with the downloaded source, investigate errors, and keep the original account until the copy is verified. These are suggested checks, not a guarantee of completeness: an ordinary file copy does not establish that version history, sharing permissions or cloud-native documents were exported. Use the provider’s export options where needed and check the export contents before canceling.

Canceling renewal, losing paid capacity and losing stored data are different events. Check the effective date and what happens if your usage exceeds the remaining allowance; a stopped payment is not an export plan.

Service	When capacity changes	What exceeding the remaining quota affects
Google One	Additional storage ends at the end of the billing cycle after cancellation	At or above the free quota, Gmail cannot send or receive mail, Drive uploads and sync stop, and Photos backups stop. Google says content may be deleted after two years or longer over quota. See its cancellation and storage policy.
iCloud+	A downgrade or cancellation takes effect after the current billing period ends	If usage exceeds the new capacity, iCloud stops syncing or updating information and backups cannot finish. Apple’s downgrade instructions advise downloading or removing excess content first; they do not promise a retention period.

Cancellation guidance checked October 21, 2026, for these two services only. These are documented policies, not tested cancellation outcomes; other providers’ retention rules are not inferred from them.

Before the capacity change, verify a separate copy and bring usage within the allowance you will retain. For Google, include Gmail and Photos in that calculation; for Apple, check whether Apple One still supplies storage before assuming a return to 5 GB. Do not treat Google’s two-year deletion threshold as two years of normal service. Compare the applicable data retention policies and your account’s notices before relying on any grace period.

Who each one is for

If you live inside one ecosystem — a Mac and an iPhone, or a Windows machine and Office — the hardware maker’s storage is the path of least resistance, and at 50 or 100 GB it is also cheap; it gets expensive per gigabyte only if you stay on the small plan while paying someone else for bulk storage too. If you use many platforms and want somewhere neutral to keep files, Dropbox, pCloud and Sync.com are the platform-agnostic options: compare the space you will actually use with the full bill, sharing features and recovery conditions. Sync’s checked entry plan is now 1 TB, so it is not the small-capacity $42-a-year option previously recommended here. A pCloud lifetime offer also needs a break-even calculation against a current annual quote, rather than an assumed service lifespan. If you want the most room for zero dollars, MEGA’s 20 GB is the biggest permanent free number on the table — as long as you ignore the bonus gigabytes when deciding what to put there.

The pattern the table exposes matters more than which one is “best”: the free tier is not a gift, it is a first-mover discount on an upsell that is already scheduled. Every one of these companies is betting that you will cross the line at some point. The only real choice you get to make is whether you cross it on their terms — a dollar a month that drifts off your card forever — or on yours, with a clear answer to what the storage is for and how you would get your files back if you stopped paying tomorrow. A free default is only free until the moment it is not.