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Nearly everyone who pays for cloud storage is buying the same thing: 2TB, because that’s the tier the phone nags you into. So start there. Two terabytes costs $99.99 a year on Google One, and $119.88 a year on both iCloud+ and Dropbox.
Identical capacity, and Apple and Dropbox each charge 20% more than Google for it. That gap is the whole article, and the rest of this is about the two situations where paying it is still the right call.
All three prices were read from the companies’ own pricing pages on 7 September 2026.
What each one actually charges
Google One’s plans page now lists three paid tiers, and the middle two are branded as AI plans rather than storage plans — the 2TB tier is called Google AI Plus and bundles Gemini access, and there is no plain-storage tier between 100GB and 2TB on the page at all.
| Plan | Monthly | Annual | Annual cost per TB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google One Basic, 100GB | $1.99 | $19.99 | $199.90 |
| Google AI Plus, 2TB | $9.99 | $99.99 | $50.00 |
| Google AI Pro, 5TB | $19.99 | $199.99 | $40.00 |
| iCloud+ 50GB | $0.99 | none offered | $237.60 |
| iCloud+ 200GB | $2.99 | none offered | $179.40 |
| iCloud+ 2TB | $9.99 | none offered | $59.94 |
| iCloud+ 6TB | $29.99 | none offered | $59.98 |
| iCloud+ 12TB | $59.99 | none offered | $59.99 |
| Dropbox Plus, 2TB | $11.99 | $119.88 | $59.94 |
Free tiers, also from the same pages: Google gives you 15GB, Apple gives you 5GB, and Dropbox gives you 2GB.
Two structural things fall straight out of that table.
Apple bills monthly only. Every iCloud+ tier on Apple’s page is quoted per month, with no annual option shown anywhere. That’s unusual — most subscriptions dangle a discount for paying up front, and the annual discount is normally worth taking. With iCloud+ there is nothing to take. You pay twelve times a year at full rate, forever.
Apple gives no volume discount either. Look down the cost-per-TB column: iCloud+ costs about $60 per terabyte per year at 2TB, at 6TB, and at 12TB. Buying six times as much storage costs almost exactly six times as much. Google’s 5TB tier, by contrast, works out at $40 per terabyte — so Google’s 5TB plan at $199.99 a year is cheaper than Apple’s 6TB plan at $359.88, for one terabyte less. If you genuinely need multiple terabytes, that $159.89 annual difference is the largest single number in this comparison.
The Dropbox billing trap
Dropbox’s pricing page loads with the yearly toggle selected, so $9.99 is the first number you see. Click “Billed monthly” and Plus becomes $11.99 a month, which is $143.88 a year rather than $119.88.
That’s $24 a year for the privilege of paying month to month — a 17% premium on the same 2TB. Dropbox’s own toggle advertises it as “Save 15%”.
The business tiers move the same way: Standard is $15 per user per month billed yearly and $18 billed monthly; Advanced is $24 yearly and $30 monthly. If you’re paying Dropbox monthly out of habit, switching billing cycles is a free $24 and takes about ninety seconds.
The calculation to run before you pay anyone
Open your phone’s storage settings and find the actual size of your photo library. That single number decides this, and most people’s is far smaller than the tier they’re paying for.
- Under 45GB? iCloud+ 50GB at $0.99 a month — $11.88 a year — is the correct fix for an iPhone that keeps complaining. Not 200GB. Not 2TB.
- 45–190GB? Google One’s 100GB annual plan is $19.99 a year; iCloud+ 200GB is $35.88. Google is cheaper per gigabyte, Apple is less work on an iPhone.
- Over 200GB? You’re in 2TB territory, and it’s $99.99 versus $119.88 versus $119.88.
Now multiply by the years you expect to keep it. Cloud storage is the most durable subscription there is — nobody cancels the thing holding their photographs. At the 2TB tier, five years of Google is $499.95 and five years of Apple or Dropbox is $599.40. The $19.89 annual gap is really a $99.45 decision.
If you have Prime, you may be paying twice
One number that doesn’t appear on anyone’s pricing page: Amazon Prime members get unlimited full-resolution photo storage, plus 5GB for video. Non-members get 5GB total. We confirmed that on Amazon’s own Amazon Photos page on 7 September 2026 — availability only; we don’t publish Amazon’s prices, for reasons we explain.
Prime runs about $140 a year — approximate, because Amazon requires exact prices to come from an API we don’t have access to. But if you already pay it for delivery, the photo storage is free at the margin, and photos are what fills most people’s 2TB.
So: if your storage problem is photos, and you’re a Prime member, and you’re comfortable with Amazon’s app rather than Apple’s or Google’s, you may not need any of the three subscriptions above. That’s a real saving of $99.99 to $143.88 a year. Amazon Prime has plenty of other problems, and we’ve gone through whether it’s worth it on its own terms — but on this one axis it quietly beats every dedicated storage plan.
The catch is real: Amazon Photos does not sync automatically unless you turn Auto-Save on, video is capped at 5GB, and it is not a general-purpose file system. It solves photos. It doesn’t solve documents.
Does the AI bundling change the maths?
Google’s 2TB tier now includes Gemini app access with higher usage limits, and the 5TB tier includes the Pro model, Deep Research, YouTube Premium Lite and Google Home Premium. That matters if — and only if — you were going to buy an AI subscription anyway.
At $19.99 a month, Google AI Pro is priced level with the other flagship assistants, which we compared separately. If you already want that, 5TB of storage arrives free. If you don’t, note what’s happened: Google’s mid-tier storage now costs the same as it did but is sold as an AI product, and the $9.99 tier is no longer a plain storage plan you can opt out of the extras on.
Apple and Dropbox sell you storage. Google sells you storage with something attached. Neither is wrong; just don’t pay the Pro price for terabytes you won’t use.
Verdict
Buy Google One 2TB annually ($99.99) if you’re on Android, or on a mixed household of devices, or simply want the cheapest 2TB. It’s the best-value tier of the nine in the table, it shares with up to five other people, and paying annually saves $19.89 over the monthly rate.
Buy iCloud+ if everyone in your house is on Apple hardware. You’re paying $19.89 a year for device backups that just work and Photos integration nobody else can match. That’s a defensible premium — but understand you’re buying convenience, not capacity, and that Apple will never offer you an annual discount for it.
Don’t buy Dropbox Plus if what you want is a bigger bucket for photos and phone backups. At $119.88 a year it costs exactly what iCloud+ 2TB costs, gives you the same 2TB, doesn’t back up your phone the way Apple or Google do, and is a single-person plan with no family sharing. Dropbox earns its price when files move between people — shared working folders, file requests, 100GB transfers, version history measured in months. If that’s not what you’re doing, you are paying a collaboration tax on a storage problem.
And don’t buy anything if your photo library is 30GB and your phone is nagging you. That’s an $11.88-a-year problem, or a free one if you have Prime. The subscription that costs the most over a decade is the one you bought a tier too high and never looked at again — which is exactly how these go unnoticed.
Prices for Google One, iCloud+ and Dropbox verified on the companies’ own pricing pages on 7 September 2026. Amazon Prime’s price is approximate and could not be confirmed at source; Amazon Photos’ storage terms were confirmed on Amazon’s own page the same day. We analyse published pricing and terms — we don’t test these services hands-on.