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

Most people never find out their cloud storage is full until the exact moment they cannot afford for it to be full. The phone refuses to back up the night before a trip, a photo backup stalls, an email bounces because the mailbox is over quota. The free tier is never something you choose — it is a default you inherit the moment you sign up, and by the time it matters, the only fix is handing over a card.

I put the free tiers side by side because the numbers do not cluster the way the marketing would have you believe. Some services hand you 15 or 20 GB of breathing room, and some hand you 2 or 5 GB and then start selling you the fix within a month. The gap between those two numbers is the entire game.

Here is the same seven services, this time with what the first paid tier actually costs per year:

Service	Free tier	First paid tier	Annual cost (US)
Google Drive (Google One)	15 GB	100 GB	$1.99/mo (≈ $24/yr)
iCloud	5 GB	50 GB	$0.99/mo (≈ $12/yr)
Dropbox	2 GB	2 TB (Plus)	$119.88/yr
Microsoft OneDrive (M365)	5 GB	1 TB (M365 Personal)	$99.99/yr
MEGA	20 GB	3 TB (Pro I)	billed in EUR, ≈ €9.99/mo
pCloud	2 GB (up to 10 GB)	500 GB (Lifetime)	one-time, no annual fee
Sync.com	5 GB	2 TB (Solo Basic)	≈ $96/yr ($8/mo)

Prices verified 2026-09-08; these change constantly, so re-check before relying on any number. Sources: Google One plans, iCloud+ pricing, Dropbox plans, OneDrive storage, MEGA pricing, pCloud plans, Sync.com pricing.

Read the free-tier column left to right and a pattern jumps out. Google Drive, MEGA and (with a little effort) pCloud give you enough room that a normal person can live on the free plan for a while. Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft’s OneDrive give you 5 GB, which is roughly one modern phone’s worth of photos and then a hard stop. Dropbox’s 2 GB is the smallest here, and it fills almost immediately. The services with the tiniest free tiers are not the ones that most aggressively want you to spend — they are just the ones whose defaults are most tightly coupled to hardware you already bought.

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. 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.

The second thing the pricing page leaves out is what happens to the gap. Dropbox’s free tier is 2 GB but its first paid tier jumps straight to 2 TB of space — there is no 100 GB step in between, so a person who just wants to move past 2 GB has to buy a terabyte and two-thirds more. Google and Apple smooth that staircase with small increments (100 GB and 50 GB), which is why their free users convert so readily: the next step is a dollar a month, not ten. 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 more than the way it goes in. Dropbox and Microsoft price their personal tiers annually and push you hard toward the yearly number; 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 bills in euros even for US customers, so the familiar dollar amount is always a moving conversion target. pCloud is the outlier that sells a one-time lifetime payment instead of a subscription at all, which removes the recurring charge entirely but asks you to bet on a vendor a decade in advance.

Then there is the question nobody asks until it is too late: how do you get your data back out? This is where the free tier quietly becomes a wall. Google exposes Takeout to export Drive, Gmail and Photos in one go; Apple makes you download photos through iCloud or the Photos app rather than a single clean export; Dropbox and OneDrive at least keep your files in a real folder structure on a desktop client, so “export” is just copying the folder. The services that hand you the most for free — MEGA and pCloud — are also the ones where a bulk exit matters most, because their “free” is partly a set of time-limited bonuses rather than a permanent grant.

That last point deserves its own paragraph, because it is the most common way people get burned. MEGA advertises 20 GB of free storage, but part of that figure is earned through install bonuses and referrals that start with a smaller base and can expire after a year. pCloud similarly starts you at 2 GB and lets you unlock up to 10 GB by completing tasks. So the headline “20 GB free” and “10 GB free” are conditional ceilings, not what the account holds on day one. I already follow a rule of thumb about this precise trap — checking what the export actually contains before I trust a tool’s promises.

Canceling is its own separate question, and it usually goes unasked until the last minute. Most of these accounts, when you stop paying, do not delete your files the next day — they downgrade you back to the free tier and leave your data in place, at least for a grace period, at which point you are merely over quota rather than wiped. The danger is the opposite of total loss: it is the slow squeeze of being told, month after month, that your files are still there and just waiting for you to re-subscribe.

So who is each of these actually 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 the most expensive per gigabyte. If you use many platforms and just want somewhere neutral to keep files, Dropbox and pCloud are the platform-agnostic options, with pCloud’s lifetime model appealing only if you are sure the vendor will still exist in 2035. If you want the most room for zero dollars and do not mind the caveats, MEGA’s 20 GB is the biggest honest free number on the table, provided you read the bonus structure.

My real conclusion is less about which one is “best” and more about the pattern the table exposes: 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.