// 9TO5MAC — MOBILE & WEB
Tired of paying for cloud storage every month? pCloud’s Black Friday Lifetime deal is the cure for subscription fatigue
Software used to be a one-time purchase, but over time, with the addition of cloud storage and services, everything has become a subscription. One company even tried to make your car seat heaters a subscription. Count the subscriptions you’re paying for right now: iCloud, a password manager, a couple of streaming services, a music service, maybe a VPN, and whatever other app decided this year that it needed to be $4.99 per month for something that used to be a one-time purchase.
Everything is a service now, and a lot of people are hitting the point where one more monthly charge is one too many on principle alone. Cloud storage is the one that’s hardest to cancel, because your photos and files are in it. That’s exactly why pCloud’s Lifetime plans are worth a look this Black Friday: you pay once, and your storage is yours for life!
Apple gives you 5 GB of iCloud for free, which stops being enough about a week after you buy an iPhone. The irony is that they launched with 5 GB of free storage in 2011, and it’s almost laughable that it hasn’t been increased since.
After that, it’s a subscription forever. The 2 TB iCloud+ plan costs $9.99 a month, about $120 a year, for as long as you want your photos to stay where they are. pCloud’s math is different. The 2 TB Lifetime plan is a one-time payment that costs less than four years of iCloud+ at the same size, and the day you buy it is the last day you pay anything for it.
pCloud has offered lifetime plans for 9 years and now 24 million people use it, and it’s run by a Swiss company under Swiss privacy law. The “what if they go away” question is fair for any lifetime offer, and a company with that track record is the best answer you’re going to get.
If you’ve been paying for iCloud or Google Drive storage for all of your files for the last 9 years instead of using pCloud, go do the math on how much you’ve spent.
Apple charges a lot to move from a 256 GB MacBook Air to a 512 GB one, and you can’t change your mind later with a hard drive upgrade. Storage has gotten incredibly pricey in recent years as well. pCloud Drive is your solution without breaking the bank. It’s a native Mac app that mounts your pCloud storage as a drive in Finder, so your files appear as if they’re natively on your Mac but live in the cloud until you open them. A 256 GB laptop with a 2 TB pCloud Drive behind it stops feeling small. It runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, and everything stays in sync across all of them in real time.
With pCloud Backup, backing up the folders you choose is easy and safe from a lost laptop, fire, flood, or theft. If you run a NAS at home, pCloud supports backing it up via WebDAV, Rsync, SFTP, and SCP, making it a real offsite destination for a Synology NAS, not just a simple sync folder. It would be a perfect offsite backup for small businesses, remote workers, etc.
iCloud Photos is great, but it uses storage from your iCloud storage quota, which can get expensive as Apple’s cameras get better and better and file sizes keep increasing. Every pCloud plan includes pCloud Photos, a photo gallery that organizes everything by date on a timeline, automatically tags objects and scenes, and groups shots into albums by event and person.
The pCloud mobile app backs up your camera roll automatically to free up space on your iPhone; a Memories feature resurfaces older photos, as the Photos app does; and a built-in document scanner turns receipts and paperwork into PDFs without needing a separate app. Inside the app, there is also a built-in Photo Editor with crop, rotate, brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, and eight one-click filters, so quick fixes don’t require moving it back to Apple Photos.