As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases, including a fee if you start Amazon Prime through the link below. Google, Apple, Microsoft and Flickr pay us nothing — those four links are plain, and two of them are our top picks. See our methodology.
Storing photos in the cloud costs anywhere from $11.88 a year to $132 a year on dedicated plans, at the companies’ own prices, and the odd thing about the range is where “unlimited” lands in it. Flickr Pro’s unlimited plan costs $82 a year. Google’s 2TB plan costs $99.99. The capped plan is the expensive one.
That doesn’t make Flickr the answer for most people. The question that decides this is not which service is best but how big your photo library actually is, and whether it’s photos you’re storing or everything your phone makes, video included.
Every price below was read from the company’s own pricing page on 4 November 2026.
Every photo-relevant plan, side by side
| Plan | Storage | Monthly | Annual | 10-year cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| iCloud+ 50GB | 50GB | $0.99 | none offered | $118.80 |
| Google One Basic | 100GB | $1.99 | $19.99 | $199.90 |
| Microsoft 365 Basic | 100GB | $1.99 | $19.99 | $199.90 |
| iCloud+ 200GB | 200GB | $2.99 | none offered | $358.80 |
| Flickr Pro (2-year plan) | Unlimited | — | $74 ($148 per 2 years) | $740 |
| Flickr Pro (annual) | Unlimited | $11.00 | $82 | $820 |
| Microsoft 365 Personal | 1TB | $9.99 | $99.99 | $999.90 |
| Google AI Plus | 2TB | $9.99 | $99.99 | $999.90 |
| iCloud+ 2TB | 2TB | $9.99 | none offered | $1,198.80 |
| Microsoft 365 Family | 2TB shared, up to 6 people | $12.99 | $129.99 | $1,299.90 |
The ten-year column assumes the annual price where one exists and the monthly price where it doesn’t. It’s there because photo storage is the subscription nobody cancels — the thing holding your photographs is the last bill to go.
Free allowances, from the same pages: Google gives every account 15GB, shared across Photos, Drive and Gmail. Apple gives 5GB. Flickr’s free account holds 1,000 uploads, only 50 of which can be private.
The calculation that decides it
Open your phone’s storage settings and find the size of your photo library. Then estimate how much it grows in a year — the easiest way is to compare against last year’s figure if your phone shows one, or to take the total and divide by the years you’ve had the phone.
Now work out how long a tier lasts you:
Years until full = (tier size − library today) ÷ growth per year
A 40GB library growing by 12GB a year fills a 100GB plan in (100 − 40) ÷ 12 = 5 years. That reader should be paying $19.99 a year for those five years — $99.95 in total — not $99.99 a year for a 2TB plan they’ll still be filling in 2040. The difference over the same five years is $400.
Most people who pay for cloud storage are on a tier chosen by a phone prompt rather than by this sum. If your library is under 45GB and you’re on an iPhone, the right plan is the $0.99 iCloud+ tier at $11.88 a year; we go through that tier properly in our iCloud+ breakdown.
Google One and Microsoft 365 Basic: the same price, different extras
At 100GB, Google One and Microsoft 365 Basic both cost $19.99 a year, or $1.99 a month — so both charge $3.89 a year extra for monthly billing, which is the usual annual-versus-monthly trade in miniature.
The difference is in what else comes attached. Google’s 100GB can be shared with up to five other people, and it’s the storage behind Google Photos, which is the default photo app on Android. Microsoft’s Basic plan is for one person and adds ad-free Outlook email with 100GB of mailbox storage.
On Android, Google wins by default: your photos already go there. In a Windows-and-Outlook life, Microsoft is the same money.
Microsoft’s 2TB Family plan is the one to look at for a household. At $129.99 a year it’s $30 more than Google’s 2TB, for the same storage shared across up to six people — but it includes the Word, Excel and PowerPoint desktop apps. If anyone in the house was going to pay for Office anyway, that $30 buys a lot. If nobody was, Google’s 2TB at $99.99 is the better storage deal.
Flickr Pro: unlimited, and cheaper than 2TB
Flickr Pro is the only plan in the table with no storage ceiling, and its plan page offers three billing options:
- Monthly: $11.00 — $132 a year
- Annual: $82, which Flickr itself says saves $50 against monthly
- Two years: $148, or $74 a year, which saves $116 against 24 monthly payments
The maths of the monthly option is ugly: it’s 61% more than the annual plan for identical service. If you’re going to use Flickr Pro at all, the annual plan is the minimum sensible commitment.
On the annual plan, Flickr undercuts Google’s 2TB by $17.99 a year, and the two-year plan undercuts it by $25.99 a year. For a photographer whose library is already past a terabyte, or shooting large raw files, an uncapped plan for less than a capped one is genuinely the best value here.
The catch is what Flickr is. It’s a photo-sharing community first, built around albums, groups and view statistics, and its plan page is about photos. It isn’t where your phone sends its backups by default, it won’t hold your documents, and its plan page doesn’t mention video at all — check Flickr’s help pages before relying on it for video. For a serious hobbyist it’s a strong buy. For someone who wants their camera roll to stop nagging them, it’s the wrong tool.
Amazon Photos: free if you already pay for Prime
Amazon’s newsroom states that Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage plus 5GB of video storage, and it says so on two pages updated in May and June 2026. We couldn’t confirm it on Amazon’s Amazon Photos page itself on 4 November 2026 — the page showed us an access-restriction notice instead of its content, and we didn’t go past it.
Amazon Prime runs about $140 a year — an approximation, because Amazon requires exact prices to come from an API we don’t have access to. That makes it the most expensive way in the table to store photos if photos are all you want, and the cheapest if you already pay for it: the storage costs nothing at the margin.
The 5GB video cap is the thing to check before you rely on it. A phone that records video regularly will outgrow 5GB long before it outgrows any photo limit, and Amazon sells extra video storage separately. So Amazon Photos works as a second home for a photo library — a free backup alongside whatever your phone already uses — more than as the only one. Whether Prime is worth it on its other merits is a separate question, and we’ve worked through it here.
Where Apple fits
iCloud+ is the most expensive per gigabyte at every tier above 50GB, and it has no annual discount at all: 2TB is $119.88 a year, against $99.99 at Google. We’ve compared the three big storage plans in detail, and the conclusion holds for photos specifically. What you get for the extra $19.89 is an iPhone that backs itself up and a Photos app that syncs across Apple devices without any setup. For an all-Apple household that’s a fair price for convenience. It’s not a price for capacity.
Verdict
Buy Google One 100GB at $19.99 a year if your library is under about 90GB and you’re on Android or a mix of devices. It’s the cheapest plan that covers most real photo libraries, and the formula above tells you how many years it’ll last.
Buy Microsoft 365 Basic instead if you’re a Windows-and-Outlook person with a similar library. Same price, one person.
Buy Flickr Pro on the annual or two-year plan if you’re a photographer with a library past a terabyte. At $74–$82 a year, it’s the only uncapped option and it costs less than any 2TB plan.
Use Amazon Photos as a free second copy if you already pay for Prime — and turn it on today, since it costs you nothing more.
Don’t buy Prime for photo storage alone. At about $140 a year it costs seven times Google’s 100GB plan, and its 5GB video limit means it can’t hold a modern phone’s camera roll by itself.
Don’t pay Flickr monthly. $132 a year for something sold at $82 is the most expensive line in the table.
And don’t buy 2TB for a 40GB library. That’s $80 a year for empty space, and over a decade it’s the single biggest overpayment in this article.
Prices for Google One, iCloud+, Microsoft 365 and Flickr Pro verified on the companies’ own pricing pages on 4 November 2026. Amazon Prime’s price is approximate and could not be confirmed at source; Amazon Photos’ storage terms come from Amazon’s own newsroom (pages updated May and June 2026), because Amazon’s Amazon Photos page could not be read on 4 November 2026. We analyse published pricing and terms — we don’t test these services hands-on.