| Plan | Storage | Intended price | Included |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 5 GB | $0 | Encrypted backup, albums, share links, export, CLI. Not a trial — it does not expire. |
| Safe | 250 GB | $4.99 / month · $49 / year | Everything in Free, plus a human answering support. |
| Vault | 1 TB | $17.99 / month · $179 / year | Everything in Safe. |
| Family | 2 TB shared, 6 people | $35.99 / month · $359 / year | Six accounts, six separate passphrases, one bill. No member can read another member's library. |
Google One is $9.99/month for 2 TB and iCloud+ is $9.99/month for 2 TB. We cannot match that, because they own their data centres and we rent object storage. Rented storage costs roughly $7 per TB per month before we have paid for anything else. A 2 TB plan sold at $9.99 is a bet that you will never fill it.
So our prices are set the other way round: every plan is profitable even if you use every byte you paid for. We would rather charge more and not need you to under-use the thing.
| Plan | Storage cost if you fill it | Gross margin, full | Gross margin, 50% full |
|---|---|---|---|
| Safe 250 GB | $1.71 / month | 65.7% | 82.8% |
| Vault 1 TB | $7.01 / month | 61.0% | 80.5% |
| Family 2 TB | $14.03 / month | 61.0% | 80.5% |
Computed at €6.49 per TB-month (Hetzner Object Storage, the store we intend to launch on, base price excluding VAT, includes 1 TB of egress), converted at 1.08 USD/EUR.
We measured three backends before writing a line of storage code, at 2026-09-15 prices:
| Backend | $/GB-month | Egress | Vault 1TB margin, full | Vault 1TB margin, 50% full |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare R2 | $0.0150 | Free | 14.6% | 57.3% |
| Hetzner Object Storage | $0.00685 | 1 TB/mo included, then metered | 61.0% | 80.5% |
| Hetzner Storage Box (dedicated box, e.g. the 20 TB tier) | ~$0.00214 | Unlimited, free | 87.8% | 93.9% |
A dedicated Storage Box is, gigabyte for gigabyte, the cheapest of the three by a wide margin — and its bandwidth is free, which matters for a product whose whole job is restoring your files. It is not an S3-style API (SFTP/WebDAV instead), it lives in one location rather than spread across a multi-AZ object store, and buying a dedicated one is real, ongoing spend — an owner decision, not something we turn on by default. The beta runs today on the 1 TB Storage Box we already own, shared with the fleet's own cold archive: PhotoSafe is capped to a small, fixed slice of it (currently 5 GB) so it can never compete with that archive for space, and automatically spills over to R2 the moment either that cap or the box's live free space gets tight. R2 stays wired in as the overflow and as a second-copy option. Bandwidth is not in these tables at all because none of the three backends charge us for the egress a restore generates.
| Service | Free | Representative paid plan | End-to-end encrypted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google One / Photos | 15 GB (shared with Gmail & Drive) | 100 GB $1.99/mo · 2 TB $9.99/mo · 5 TB $19.99/mo | No |
| iCloud+ | 5 GB | 50 GB $0.99 · 200 GB $2.99 · 2 TB $9.99 · 6 TB $29.99 · 12 TB $59.99 | Only with Advanced Data Protection, off by default |
| Amazon Photos | 5 GB; unlimited full-resolution photos with Prime | 100 GB $1.99/mo · 1 TB $6.99/mo · 2 TB $11.99/mo | No |
| Ente Photos | 10 GB | 50 GB $2.49 · 200 GB $4.99 · 1 TB $9.99 · 2 TB $19.99/mo | Yes |
| Proton Drive | 5 GB | 200 GB $4.99/mo ($3.99 annual); 2 TB via Duo | Yes |
| pCloud | Limited | 500 GB $49.99/yr · 2 TB $99.99/yr · 10 TB $299.99/yr; lifetime plans | Only with the paid Crypto add-on |
| Dropbox | Limited | Plus 2 TB $9.99/mo · Standard 3 TB $15/user/mo | No |
| Mylio Photos | Full app, free | Photos+ $12.99/mo · $119.99/yr — syncs your own devices, no cloud storage included | N/A, your devices |
| PhotoPrism | Community edition, free (AGPL) | Essentials €2/mo · Plus from €6/mo · managed from $6.50/mo — you supply the storage | N/A, your server |
| Immich | Free, AGPL, self-hosted | No hosted plan exists; an optional product key supports the project | N/A, your server |
| PhotoSafe | 5 GB | 250 GB $4.99 · 1 TB $17.99 · 2 TB family $35.99/mo | Yes |
Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on 15 September 2026, US pricing where regional pricing exists. They change; if you find one of these wrong, tell us and we will correct it.
If price per gigabyte is what you care about, Amazon Photos with Prime or Google One beats us and it is not close. If you want end-to-end encryption with real mobile apps today, Ente is cheaper than us and more mature than us, and we would rather you went there than were disappointed here. If you are willing to run a server, Immich is free and excellent.
What we offer that none of those combine: a flat price that does not need you to under-use it, a published format you can decrypt with 200 lines of open Python, an export button that is free and unthrottled, and no bundle — you are not buying a VPN, a mail account or an AI subscription to get storage.