Quick Answer — How Do You Compare Cloud Storage Plans?
Normalise every plan to an effective monthly price, then divide it two ways. Effective Monthly = (Annual Price)/12 where annual billing exists, otherwise the monthly rate. From there, Cost per TB = (Effective Monthly)/(Capacity GB) × 1000 ranks providers against each other, and Cost per GB stored = (Effective Monthly)/(Storage You Need) tells you what you are paying for the data you actually have.
Published comparisons give you the first number and stop. It quietly assumes you will fill the plan, which almost nobody does — and the gap is large. On a 2 TB plan at $9.99/month holding 300 GB, cost per TB reads a tidy $5.00, while the honest per-GB figure is $0.0333 — about six and a half times the headline rate of $0.005 per GB.
At the mainstream 2 TB tier, illustrative 2026 pricing compares like this:
- iCloud+ 2 TB, $9.99/month, no annual option — $9.99 effective, $4.995/TB, $599.40 over five years
- Google One 2 TB, $9.99/month or $99.99/year — $8.33 effective, $4.166/TB, $499.95 over five years, saving $19.89/year
- Dropbox Plus 2 TB, $11.99/month or $119.88/year — $9.99 effective, $4.995/TB, $599.40 over five years, saving $24.00/year
Annual billing is doing most of the work in that table. Google One and Dropbox charge different monthly rates but land within a cent of each other once you compare like for like — and switching Dropbox from monthly to annual saves more per year than the entire price gap between the two providers.