What cloud storage costs per terabyte per year
Every mainstream cloud storage plan, normalised to the one number none of them print — dollars per terabyte per year. Prices read from the vendors on 23 August 2026.
pCloud Premium Plus 2 TB (lifetime)
pCloud pricing page, Lifetime tab — read on 24 August 2026.
$399.00 one-off · list price
$0.00 one-off · on renewal
- Billed
- $399.00 once
- Renews at
- $0.00 once
- Free tier
- Yes — pCloud advertises "up to 10 GB of free storage", no card required.
- Price read from
- pCloud pricing page, Lifetime tab
- Checked
- Vendor
- pcloud.com
pCloud sells the same 2 TB as a single $399 payment, labelled “ONE-TIME PAYMENT” and shown against a struck-through $599. The 10 TB Ultra equivalent is $1,190, against a struck-through $1,890.
This is the only row on the ledger where the renewal column is a real number rather than a blank, and the number is zero. pCloud states there is nothing further to pay, so that is what we have recorded.
Against pCloud’s own $99.99 annual plan the lifetime option breaks even at 3.99 years — call it four. Every year after that costs nothing, so at five years it is $39.90 per terabyte per year and at ten years $19.95. The 10 TB lifetime plan breaks even against its annual equivalent at almost exactly the same point, 3.97 years.
The risk is not in the arithmetic. It is that “lifetime” is bounded by the company’s lifetime, and you have paid four years up front to find out.
Where we have written about this
This is a price record, not a review. We do not rate the product, we track what it charges. The method is on how we check prices; mistakes end up in the corrections log.