Is your cloud storage demanding extra payment? Worried about being locked out of your own data?

Most people use their phone or operating system provider cloud storage solution to keep their data safe and shared between devices.

As of September 2026 these are some providers and their monthly prices:

  • Apple: 5GB free, 50GB £0.99, 200GB £2.99, 2TB £8.99
  • Google:15GB free, 100GB £1.59, 2TB £7.99, 5TB £18.99
  • Microsoft:100GB £1.99, 1TB £8.49

The problem is twofold: The storage works as a permanent rent and the devices make easy to use more storage. The bill will keep increasing until you pay more or decide to delete old stuff without the tools to manage it adequately.

This is easier said than done. These providers offer ease of use and integrations with all of their apps. For example, google docs offer storage, backups, search and the upgrades together and conviniently so it can be used from the browser or the phone app.

A few strategies

1. Diversify This strategy is to diversify your providers at the cost of extra subscriptions. For example, proton offers cloud storage, office suite and email. nextcloud offers storage and office. Obsidian, notion offer their own hosting for their products that can act as documentation storages.

2. Expiry After a few years, moving jobs or moving houses, some documents, media or emails become obsolete and mostly gather digital dust in some data centre. Dumping some of the old data to a local storage works particularly well for emails.

3. Host alternative apps There is a set of open source applications that can be hosted locally or in the cloud. There are alternatives for almost any of the apps that the main providers offer https://www.thewebisfree.com/ultimate-list-of-self-hosted-alternatives/

4. Manage locally There are 100% local solutions that allow to keep devices synchronised without using a server at all. Programs like syncthing or git that allow a pure p2p configuration.

5. Reduce This is the most overlooked solution. With the right tools it is easy to remove redundant information and keep your data footprint [[20260622122104-exodata]] in check.

6. GDPR This law grants you the right to delete, amend, retrieve and move to other services. They can be used with your existing provider to ease some of their drawbacks.

What to do?

There is no single answer. Some people can tolerate having their data in the cloud while managed for themselves. Others prefer to pay to have these services managed and simply want some data resilience. A few people prefer to have local only solutions.

Each application or functionality have different tradeoffs. For example calendars are very light in storage but require to be available and synchronise frequently. Videos are heavy but do not change often.