Calculator
Cloud storage cost calculator (5-year)
Pick a provider and a plan, slide the years. The math is simple but the result is usually larger than people expect, especially once you include the price hikes that have become routine.
Pick your plan
Dropbox
Google One
iCloud+
OneDrive
Mega
Other
Total over 5 years
$844
Average effective rate: $14/month
Compounding 8% per year off the current $12/month rate.
For most household-scale data, a one-time hardware purchase plus a USB drive comes in well under $844over the same horizon, with no recurring fees. This isn't universally the right tradeoff: cloud storage buys you sharing flows, mobile apps, and zero ops. But the bill never goes down.
Numbers shown are typical published prices at time of writing. Most providers raise prices every 18-24 months. Treat the outputs as a floor, not a ceiling.
If the math is making you reconsider the recurring side, the related essay “Off-site backup for free: distributing files across cloud free tiers” walks through one defensible alternative for personal-scale data, with honest tradeoffs. Or play with the backup overview demo to see how the distributed-free-tier pattern actually allocates files in practice.