Storage has quietly become one of the worst deals in consumer tech right now. The RAM shortage rippling through the supply chain is pushing storage costs up across the board, which makes this 4th of July deal from pCloud worth paying attention to.
Through July 8, pCloud is offering its lifetime cloud storage plans at record low prices, with zero-knowledge encryption thrown in for free. The 1TB individual plan drops to $199 (down from $664), the 2TB plan hits $299 (down from $828), and if you actually need serious storage, the 10TB plan comes in at $890 instead of $2,119 (our favorite). These are one-time payments, no subscriptions, no recurring fees and no price hikes next year.
Here’s a number that puts things in perspective: the Samsung T7 Portable SSD, one of the most popular 1TB external drives on Amazon, is currently on sale for $219, up from $75 last year. That’s a physical drive you can lose, drop, or have fail on you after a few years. pCloud’s 1TB lifetime plan is $199, costs less, lives in the cloud, syncs across all your devices automatically and comes with zero-knowledge encryption included.
Why lifetime cloud storage makes more sense than it used to
The “pay once” model has always been a reasonable pitch but the current hardware market makes it a compelling one. When physical drives are getting more expensive by the month and cloud subscription prices tend to creep up alongside them, locking in a flat rate for life starts looking less like a novelty and more like a hedge.
pCloud runs three major promotions a year: Valentine’s Day, the 4th of July, and Black Friday. These are the only moments where prices reliably hit their lowest point, and if you miss one you’re waiting several months for the next. The 4th of July edition is historically one of the deepest discounts of the year which is why it’s worth flagging now rather than after July 8.
pCloud is Swiss-based which matters for privacy reasons: your data sits under Swiss privacy laws, and the zero-knowledge encryption, called pCloud Encryption, means your files are encrypted on your device before they ever reach pCloud’s servers. The company literally cannot read them which is the kind of detail that separates a real privacy product from one that just uses the word privacy in its marketing.
One thing that sets pCloud apart from most cloud services is that you actually get to choose where your data lives: The company runs two certified data centers, one in the US and one in Luxembourg, and you pick which one stores your files at signup. For Americans who want their data on home soil, the US data center is right there. For anyone who prefers their files sitting under European privacy law, Luxembourg is the other option. Either way, the choice is yours, which is something Google Drive and Dropbox don’t offer their users.
On the practical side, the service covers all the bases you’d expect: real-time sync across all your devices, automatic backups, apps for Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android, and a built-in media player that lets you stream audio and video directly from the cloud. There’s also a photo gallery that organizes your images by date with a timeline you can scrub through, a built-in photo editor, and pDocs, a newer feature that lets you create and edit documents collaboratively without routing everything through Google.
With over 22 million users across 130 countries and 99.98% uptime, pCloud isn’t a startup taking a gamble on the lifetime model. The deal runs until July 8 and if you’ve been putting off dealing with your storage situation, the combination of record low prices and record high hard drive costs makes this a great moment to stop waiting.