What cloud storage costs per terabyte per year

Subscription cloud storage costs between $21.67 and $238.80 per terabyte per year in 2026, and which box you tick matters far more than which company you pick. The cheapest headline rate is Microsoft 365 Family at $129.99 a year for “up to 6 TB”, which is $21.67 per terabyte — but that is six 1 TB allowances for six people, not a 6 TB drive. For one person who simply wants a lot of space, pCloud is cheapest: $99.99 a year for 2 TB, or $299.99 for 10 TB, which is $30.00 per terabyte per year. Apple’s iCloud+, Google One and Dropbox Plus all charge $9.99 a month for 2 TB — $119.88 a year, $59.94 per terabyte — to the penny. Every figure here was read from the vendor on 23 August 2026.

The comparison the vendors avoid printing

Nobody sells storage in terabyte-years, so nobody quotes a price in them. The plans come in different sizes, on different billing periods, with different things bolted on. Below is every plan normalised: the annual cost, the capacity as the vendor defines it, and the two divided into each other.

All prices US list, read from each vendor's own pricing page on 23 August 2026. Monthly plans multiplied by twelve. "Per TB per year" is the annual cost divided by the capacity the vendor advertises.

The small tiers are punishing. Google’s 100 GB plan costs almost exactly four times as much per terabyte as Google’s own 2 TB plan, and Microsoft’s 100 GB Basic costs more than nine times what Microsoft’s Family plan does. Buying a little storage is the most expensive way to buy storage, everywhere, by a wide margin.

The middle of the market, meanwhile, has converged to the cent: three unrelated companies charge the same $119.88 a year for the same 2 TB.

Apple charges the same per terabyte at every size

This is the finding worth the check. Apple’s US iCloud+ prices on 23 August 2026 were $0.99 for 50 GB, $2.99 for 200 GB, $9.99 for 2 TB, $29.99 for 6 TB and $59.99 for 12 TB, all monthly. Run the three large tiers out to a year and divide:

• 2 TB — $119.88 a year — $59.94 per TB
• 6 TB — $359.88 a year — $59.98 per TB
• 12 TB — $719.88 a year — $59.99 per TB

A five-cent spread across a sixfold increase in capacity. Every other vendor here tapers: Google’s rate falls from $238.80 at 100 GB to $47.98 at 5 TB, Microsoft’s from $199.90 to $21.67, pCloud’s from $99.98 to $30.00. Apple simply charges sixty dollars a terabyte a year and stops thinking about it.

There is also no annual plan. Apple’s support page states that after you upgrade you are billed monthly, and the whole published price list is monthly. Where Dropbox will knock $24 off for prepaying, Apple offers nothing, so iCloud+ is the only plan here with no cheaper way to buy it.

Google One sells storage under an AI name now, and the names disagree

Google One’s 2 TB tier is $9.99 a month, which lands it exactly alongside Apple and Dropbox. Getting to that number took longer than it should have.

On 23 August 2026 the Google One plans page listed three paid tiers: Basic at 100 GB for $1.99 a month, “Google AI Plus” at 2 TB for $9.99, and “Google AI Pro” at 5 TB for $19.99. Google’s separate Google AI plans page, read the same day, showed “Google AI Plus” at $4.99 a month with 400 GB, “Google AI Pro” at $19.99 with 5 TB, and a “Google AI Ultra” from $99.99 a month starting at 20 TB. The AI Pro tier matches across both pages. The AI Plus tier does not — same name, different capacity, different price, two of Google’s own pages.

We have priced the 2 TB tier at what the plans page showed, because that is the page a person shopping for storage lands on. But this is the state of the category: the storage tier you want is now a byproduct of an assistant subscription, and the assistant subscriptions are being renamed faster than the pricing pages can keep up.

Google also badges annual billing “Save up to 16%” without printing the annual figure. There is a discount, we could not read what it is, and so we have not recorded one.

Microsoft’s 6 TB is six separate terabytes

Microsoft 365 Family at $129.99 a year is the cheapest terabyte in the table by a distance, and the asterisk is doing heavy work. Microsoft’s own wording is “Up to 6 TB of secure cloud storage (1 TB per person)”, for up to six people. The terabytes attach to six separate accounts. You cannot pool them, so if you are one person, Family gets you 1 TB — the same 1 TB that Personal gets you for $99.99.

That is still the right buy for a household. Two people wanting a terabyte each pay $129.99 on Family against $199.98 on two Personals. But $21.67 per terabyte per year is a number that requires six real humans, and the storage is arguably not the product anyway: the same money carries the desktop Office apps, Copilot allowances and Defender for all six.

Microsoft 365 Personal, meanwhile, is the worst per-terabyte deal of any 1 TB-or-larger plan here at $99.99. If storage is genuinely all you want from it, almost everything else in the table is cheaper.

Dropbox is the same price as Apple, with the smallest free tier

Dropbox Plus is 2 TB at $9.99 a month prepaid, a single $119.88 charge, or $11.99 a month if you pay as you go — $143.88 across a year. The prepay saves $24, which is the largest prepay discount anyone in this group offers, and Dropbox is unusual in showing both numbers on the same page with a toggle rather than burying the monthly rate.

Its free tier is the tightest in the category at 2 GB, against 5 GB from Apple and Microsoft, up to 15 GB from Google and up to 10 GB from pCloud. That is not a rounding difference; it is the difference between a free tier you can use for something and one that exists to be outgrown.

pCloud, and how to think about a lifetime plan

pCloud is the cheapest conventional storage here: $99.99 a year for 2 TB and $299.99 for 10 TB, or $50.00 and $30.00 per terabyte per year. It is also the only vendor selling a lifetime plan — $399 once for 2 TB, $1,190 once for 10 TB, both shown against struck-through higher figures.

The arithmetic on lifetime plans is simple and people usually get it right: $399 against $99.99 a year breaks even at 3.99 years, and the 10 TB pair breaks even at 3.97. Keep the 2 TB lifetime plan five years and it works out at $39.90 per terabyte per year; keep it ten and it is $19.95, which beats everything in the table except Backblaze at high volumes.

The part people get wrong is what they are actually buying. A lifetime plan is not a storage purchase, it is four years of subscription paid up front in exchange for an option on the years after that — and the option is written by a company whose continued existence is the only thing that makes it worth anything. That is not a prediction about pCloud, which has been selling these since the last decade. It is just the shape of the trade, and it is worth being clear-eyed that the break-even sits four years out.

Backblaze is not a drive

Backblaze Computer Backup is $99 a year, or $9 a month, or $189 for two years, for unlimited data from one computer plus its attached external drives. On price per terabyte it wins outright once you have real volume: 5 TB backed up is $19.80 per terabyte per year, 10 TB is $9.90, and it keeps falling.

It is in a different category all the same. Backup mirrors what is already on a machine you own; it does not give you space to put things in, and it is not a folder that syncs between your phone and your laptop. The licence covers one computer, so a second machine is a second $99. Compare it against the others on price per terabyte by all means, but do not conclude you can replace a 2 TB sync plan with it.

Nobody in this category publishes a renewal price

The renewal column in the ledger above is almost entirely blank, and for once that is not a story about vendors hiding something.

Cloud storage does not run the first-term pricing that makes VPN and meal-kit renewals such a reliable source of complaints. There is no $2.99-for-the-first-year-then-$12.99 structure here. The monthly plans are month-to-month at a flat price. The annual plans are sold at a standing annual price, discounted against paying monthly rather than against a later renewal. Microsoft and Dropbox both state that subscriptions renew automatically; neither states a figure. Apple publishes no renewal price for what is a month-to-month charge.

So “not published” here means we looked and found no stated renewal price, which is what it always means on this site. It is not a warning. The one row with a real number in that column is the pCloud lifetime plan, where the number is $0.00, because pCloud labels it a one-time payment and there is nothing further to charge.

If you want the single sentence: pay pCloud $99.99 a year for 2 TB or $299.99 for 10 TB if you want storage, take Microsoft 365 Family at $129.99 if there are genuinely six of you, and understand that choosing Apple, Google or Dropbox instead costs the same $119.88 a year and buys you something other than gigabytes.