Cloud backup prices, compared
The going rate for cloud storage and backup services: entry prices for 15 providers, each read from that provider’s own pricing page. The average stands at $5.94/mo.
Prices last checked on
To see two of these prices argued out in full, read the NordLocker vs Proton Drive verdict, a duel settled largely on the entry price.
Average per month
$5.94/mo
Median
$6.99/mo
Cheapest
$0.99/mo
Apple iCloud+
Providers tracked
15
Cloud backup price list, cheapest first
Each provider’s cheapest paid plan in US dollars, as listed on its own pricing page. MEGA, Internxt, Filen and Koofr list no US dollar price that they charge on their own pages, so they are not in this list.
| Rank | Provider | Relative price | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Apple iCloud+ | $0.99/mo | |
| 2 | Microsoft OneDrive | $1.67/mo | |
| 3 | Google One | $1.67/mo | |
| 4 | Proton Drive | $2.99/mo | |
| 5 | CloudsLinker | $3.33/mo | |
| 6 | pCloud | $4.17/mo | |
| 7 | Acronis True Image | $6.08/mo | |
| 8 | IDrive | $6.99/mo | |
| 9 | NordLocker | $6.99/mo | |
| 10 | Icedrive | $6.99/mo | |
| 11 | Carbonite Safe | $8.00/mo | |
| 12 | Backblaze Personal Backup | $8.25/mo | |
| 13 | Sync.com | $9.00/mo | |
| 14 | Dropbox | $9.99/mo | |
| 15 | Tresorit | $11.99/mo |
Free allowances do not count towards the paid average.
The pricing pages behind the numbers
Every price in the table above was copied from the pricing page of the provider that sells the plan, and those pages are listed below so you can open any one of them and compare. Storage providers reprice without announcement, so if the number on their page differs from ours, trust theirs.
The trend
The set of providers changed between consecutive months. The last three measurements counted 13, 11 and 12 providers. A month-on-month comparison would then reflect our own coverage rather than the market, so no trend is shown until two months share the same set. The individual prices in the table above were each taken from the provider’s own page and are valid in their own right.
Cite this data
The BackupShortlist Price Index puts the average cloud storage service at $5.94/mo (https://backupshortlist.com/data/price-index).
Reuse is free under CC BY 4.0 provided you credit the source and link back. The same data as a feed:
https://backupshortlist.com/data/price-index.jsonHow much does online backup cost per month?
Backing up one computer with any of the four backup services on our list costs between $6.08 and $8.25 a month. Acronis True Image Advanced is the cheapest at $6.08 a month with 250 GB of cloud storage, IDrive Personal 5 TB comes to $6.99, Carbonite Safe Basic to $8, and Backblaze Personal Backup to $8.25 a month for unlimited data.
The answer turns on what the plan actually covers. Backblaze Personal Backup charges $8.25 a month ($99 a year) and backs up one computer with no data cap. IDrive Personal 5 TB comes to $6.99 a month, which is $83.88 for the first year and $119.88 a year on renewal.
Carbonite Safe Basic costs $8 a month, or $95.99 a year, and the renewal price is the same; external drives are an extra charge. Acronis True Image Advanced works out at $6.08 a month, $72.99 a year, and comes with 250 GB of cloud storage instead of an unlimited allowance.
Why is the average on this page lower than the price of a backup service?
The average and median are calculated over the cheapest paid plan at each provider we follow, and some of those plans are storage tiers of only 50 GB. That basket is a fair picture of the market, but it is not what a full backup of one computer costs.
Cloud storage begins lower, at $0.99 a month for the 50 GB tier of iCloud+, because what it sells is space, not a copy of everything on your machine.
No price per terabyte appears on this page. Half of the plans above sell unlimited data for a single computer while the others sell a fixed amount of space; dividing one kind by the other gives a figure that looks exact and tells you nothing.
Methodology
Each provider on the list contributes one figure: its lowest paid monthly price, the realistic cost of getting in. From those 15 figures, one per provider with a paid plan, we report the average, the median, the cheapest and the dearest. A free tier is left out of the paid average.
Treat every figure as a guide price: each one is re-checked every week on the provider’s own page, and a promotion can move it in between. Once a month the whole set is measured again and archived. The whole series is available as a machine-readable feed.
The index is one of several inputs to the ranking. How the rest fits together, which sources we lean on and why a commission cannot move a position, is set out under how we rank.