Most affordable cloud storage plans in South Africa

South Africans looking to subscribe to a personal cloud storage have several options, with prices between R0.29 and R0.39 per gigabyte, depending on their ecosystem preferences.

Using a cloud backup to store all your data provides a convenient means of accessing files anytime and helps safeguard against data loss from hardware failure or theft.

While cyberattacks are a real threat, reputable cloud providers keep users’ data securely encrypted with 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256).

To date, there have been no confirmed instances of AES-256 being cracked. Threat actors can only access your data if your password is compromised and you do not have two-factor authentication set up.

Besides protecting against device theft, storage drives can fail, and data can get corrupted, making another strong case for cloud-based backups.

To ensure you can recover your most precious photos, videos, and other documents, you should keep a backup on the cloud. This also helps to easily transfer your data to a new device.

Tech giants Google, Apple, and Microsoft offer cloud storage plans that are easy to integrate into your platform of choice.

For those sceptical about whether investing in cloud storage is necessary, all providers included in the comparison offer free plans.

For instance, Google offers account users 15GB of free storage across its mail, photos, and storage platforms.

All the reputable cloud storage providers offer these security features as an additional layer of protection over and above your account login credentials.

Similarly, Apple and Microsoft offer account holders free storage. However, users can only use 5 GB. On the other hand, Dropbox only offers users 2GB of free storage.

Another thing to keep in mind is that WhatsApp uses Google Drive storage for backups. If you don’t have a Google One plan, you will still have up to 15GB of storage.

Google the most affordable

If users feel they need to upgrade to a paid plan with more storage, these companies offer packages ranging from 50GB to 6TB.

Apple offers the smallest cloud storage allocation, 50GB, for R14.99 per month, if users think this will suffice for their needs. This equates to roughly R0.29 per GB per month.

However, it should be noted that Apple’s iCloud+ services can only be accessed via a web browser on Android devices.

It is also important to note that all prices included are billed monthly, with more affordable prices billed yearly available.

For those looking for more than 50GB, Microsoft and Google offer 100GB options at R39 and R34.99, respectively.

While the per GB price of these is slightly higher than Apple’s 50GB option, as indicated in the table below, we found that Google tends to offer the most competitive prices overall.

This becomes evident when comparing the prices of Apple’s and Google’s 200GB subscriptions, which cost R59.99 and R52.99, respectively.

This equates to roughly R0.26 per GB for Google’s offering and R0.29 per GB for Apple’s. Microsoft does not offer a 200GB package.

The next available storage allocation is a 1TB Microsoft subscription, which costs R159 per month or R0.16 per GB. 

While this is the most storage available to Microsoft OneDrive users, Apple, Dropbox, and Google also offer 2TB packages.

Google is the most affordable of these, charging R184.99 per month, or roughly R0.09 per GB. On the other hand, Apple and Dropbox charge slightly more, at R199.99 and $11.99 (R219.15), respectively.

This is one of two paid storage offerings by Dropbox, with the other costing $19.99 (R365.38) for 3TB, or R0.12.

It is worth pointing out that, because Dropbox does not have local pricing, the cost per GB is subject to change.

Google has plans with up to 30TB of storage for R2,799 per month. However, this comparison only includes its 5TB package and below.

Google users can expect to pay R464.99 monthly for 5TB, the same per GB as the 2TB package at R0.09 per GB.

Apple offers a similar package, offering 6TB of storage for R599.99 per month. This costs slightly more per GB than the Google 5TB bundle, which costs R0.10.

The table below shows personal cloud storage packages available from the various providers. All prices are a monthly subscription fee, with the cost per GB included in brackets.