Cloud Storage Free Tiers, Explained: What the Free Gigabytes Actually Cost Later

Every service in our cloud storage ranking offers a free tier, and the free gigabytes run from 2 GB to 20 GB — a tenfold spread hiding behind the same word. The real cost arrives later: shared pools that shrink before you store a single file, headline sizes you must unlock with homework, and first paid steps that jump from 99 cents a month to a full 2 TB plan with nothing in between.

A free cloud storage tier costs nothing today and bills you later — not in money at first, but in the moment it fills up, which for most people arrives mid-backup, mid-move or mid-phone-upgrade, when switching is hardest. The ten services in our cloud storage ranking all offer a free tier, and the sizes run from 2 gigabytes to 20 gigabytes. That tenfold spread is only the first surprise. Some free pools are shared with your email and your phone backups before you store a single document, some headline numbers have to be unlocked by completing setup tasks, and the first paid step beyond free ranges from 99 cents a month to a full-priced 2 TB plan with no smaller rung at all. Read the free tier as a contract with three clauses — how much, shared with what, and what the exit costs — and it stops being a giveaway and becomes a legible choice.

The ten free tiers, side by side

Start with the raw numbers, each published by the provider on its own pricing or plans page. MEGA offers the largest free tier in our ranking at 20 GB, with the zero-knowledge encryption its paid plans are built around. Google gives every account 15 GB. IDrive and Icedrive each offer 10 GB free, and pCloud advertises up to 10 GB. Sync.com's free tier is 5 GB, Proton Drive offers up to 5 GB, and Microsoft's OneDrive and Apple's iCloud each give 5 GB with a free account. Dropbox Basic, the free tier of the service that popularized the sync folder, is 2 GB — the smallest in the ranking, one tenth of MEGA's allowance, from the company with the longest head start.

Those numbers are not measuring the same thing, which is why our methodology ranks the paid plans and treats the free tiers as on-ramps. A gigabyte of MEGA or Proton Drive storage is end-to-end encrypted space nobody else can read. A gigabyte of Google or iCloud space is a slice of a pool your other services are already drinking from, as the next section shows. And two of the numbers above carry an asterisk the size of the number itself: "up to." Hold both thoughts — the ranking order of free sizes is real, but it is not the order of usable free space for any particular household.

Clause one: the pool is shared before you start

Google's 15 GB is the clearest example. According to Google's own plans page, that storage is shared across Drive, Gmail and Google Photos — three services, one pool. A decade of Gmail attachments and a phone already backing up its photos can consume most of the 15 GB before a single file is deliberately stored in Drive, which is why so many people meet the "storage full" warning while insisting they "don't even use Drive." They do; they just call the other two taps by different names. The same structure holds at 5 GB scale elsewhere: Apple's free iCloud storage is shared with device backups, iCloud Mail and photos, and Microsoft's free 5 GB covers OneDrive files alongside Outlook.com attachments. In each case the free tier's real size, for the files you meant to store, is whatever your backups and inbox have not already taken.

The practical consequence is a measuring rule: never judge a free tier by its headline, judge it by its remainder. Open the storage meter of the account you already have — Google, Apple and Microsoft all show one — and subtract what email, backups and photos already occupy. For many households the "15 GB" tier has 4 GB left, and the "5 GB" tiers are effectively full on the day the phone first backs up. That is not a trick played by the providers; the sharing is printed on their plans pages. It is simply a clause most people sign without reading, because the number on the door was the only number advertised.

Clause two: some free gigabytes are homework

Two services in our ranking advertise a free size you do not receive at sign-up. pCloud starts a free account at 2 GB and lets it grow to the advertised 10 GB through its beginner's tutorial steps and friend invitations, with 50 GB a month of shared-link traffic included on the free plan, per pCloud's help documentation. Proton Drive likewise starts free accounts at 2 GB and raises the limit to 5 GB once three setup tasks — adding a file, creating a share link and setting up account recovery — are completed within 30 days, according to Proton's published plan details. Neither practice is hidden, and the tasks are genuinely quick. But the honest reading of both offers is "2 GB, rising to 10 or 5 if you do the onboarding" — and a reader comparing a flat 10 GB free tier from IDrive or Icedrive against pCloud's "up to 10 GB" is comparing a gift with a small job.

There is a second, quieter condition attached to several free tiers: use them or lose them. Providers' terms allow free accounts that sit idle for long stretches — commonly around a year, and in Sync.com's published terms as little as six months, without notice — to be closed. A free tier used as a cold archive you never open is therefore the least durable storage in this entire category: it is the only tier whose landlord can end the tenancy for absence. Free storage works best as a working space you touch regularly, not as a vault.

Clause three: what happens on the day it fills

Every free tier ends the same way — a hard stop, not a gentle slope. Uploads and sync fail, new phone backups pause, and on a shared pool the effects spill sideways: a full Google account stops receiving Gmail, and a full iCloud account stops backing up the phone, which converts a storage problem into a data-loss risk on the device in your pocket. Stay over the limit long enough and the consequences deepen. Google warns that content in an account left over quota after extended non-payment may be deleted, and Dropbox deletes files from accounts that remain over their limit — our ranking's own FAQ records both policies, and both are stated in the providers' terms. None of this is unreasonable; storing other people's data costs money. But it means a free tier holding the only copy of anything irreplaceable is a plan with a printed expiry mechanism.

This is the clause that decides what a free tier is for. As a working buffer — this semester's documents, the photos you are actively sorting, a synced folder between two computers — a free tier is genuinely free and genuinely useful. As the sole home of a family archive, it is a countdown. The families who get hurt by free tiers are never the ones who read the sizes wrong; they are the ones who never learned which day the countdown ends.

The first paid step: a ramp for some, a cliff for others

When the free tier fills, "what it costs later" stops being abstract, and the ten services split sharply. Some ladders start gently: Apple's first paid rung is 50 GB at $0.99 a month, Google sells 100 GB for $1.99 a month, and Microsoft 365 Basic pairs 100 GB with ad-free Outlook for $19.99 a year — small money that buys a year or two of breathing room. The privacy-first services start higher and wider: our ranking's FAQ records Sync.com's smallest regular tier at 200 GB for $60 a year and Proton Drive Plus at 200 GB for $47.88 a year, while MEGA's smallest paid tier is 400 GB. And Dropbox, in the ranking's 2 TB comparison basis, offers no small consumer rung at all: the step up from 2 GB free is its 2 TB Plus plan at $119.88 a year. Same moment — "your storage is full" — and the bill for staying ranges from twelve dollars a year to a hundred and twenty.

That spread is the actual subject of this article's title. A free tier is best understood as the first step of a staircase you have not seen: choose the free tier whose paid staircase you would happily climb, in the ecosystem you already live in, and the free gigabytes are a genuine head start. Choose by the headline alone and you can win 20 free gigabytes on a staircase whose steps do not fit your budget — then pay the one cost no provider lists on its pricing page: moving everything, again, under pressure, on the day the old account stopped accepting uploads. Our full cloud storage ranking, inside the wider Software & Digital Services rankings, prices every service on its 2 TB plan precisely so that staircase is visible before the first step is taken.

Sources

• MEGA — pricing and plans: the free plan offers 20 GB of storage with end-to-end (zero-knowledge) encryption: https://mega.io/pricing
• Google One — plans: every Google Account includes 15 GB of storage shared across Google Drive, Gmail and Google Photos; the 100 GB plan is $1.99 a month: https://one.google.com/plans
• Dropbox — plans: Dropbox Basic is free with 2 GB of storage; Dropbox Plus offers 2 TB at $119.88 a year billed annually: https://www.dropbox.com/plans
• Apple — iCloud+: every account includes 5 GB of free iCloud storage, shared with backups, mail and photos; iCloud+ starts at 50 GB for $0.99 a month: https://www.apple.com/icloud/
• Microsoft — Microsoft 365 plans compared: a free Microsoft account includes 5 GB of OneDrive storage; Microsoft 365 Basic includes 100 GB for $19.99 a year: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/buy/compare-all-microsoft-365-products
• pCloud — cloud storage pricing plans and help documentation: a free account starts at 2 GB and can be expanded to up to 10 GB through the beginner's tutorial and invitations, with 50 GB a month of shared-link traffic on the free plan: https://www.pcloud.com/cloud-storage-pricing-plans.html
• Proton Drive — pricing: the free plan starts at 2 GB and can be expanded to 5 GB by completing setup tasks; Drive Plus offers 200 GB at $47.88 a year: https://proton.me/drive/pricing
• Sync.com — pricing and terms: the free Starter tier offers 5 GB with end-to-end encryption; the smallest regular paid tier in our ranking's comparison is 200 GB at $60 a year, and Sync's terms allow a free account unused for six months to be ended: https://www.sync.com/pricing/
• IDrive — pricing: IDrive Basic offers 10 GB of cloud backup and storage free, with no credit card required: https://www.idrive.com/pricing
• Icedrive — plans: the free plan offers 10 GB of cloud storage at sign-up: https://icedrive.net/plans
• AmRank cloud storage ranking and its FAQ: the ranking is priced on the 2 TB plan (or closest tier at or above it) per year; 2 TB holds roughly 500,000 photos at typical phone sizes; MEGA's smallest paid tier is 400 GB and Icedrive publishes no 200 GB tier; providers typically keep cancelled or over-quota accounts read-only for a grace period, Google warns content in an over-quota account may be deleted after extended non-payment, and Dropbox deletes files once an account has stayed over its limit: ../../rankings/software/cloud-storage/index.html