Apple offers unique integrations for most of what it does. You might not find a perfect analog at lower cost, but they exist.
In a world with ever-rising costs, some readers want to trim their budgets. iCloud+ pricing for 50GB ($0.99/ £0.99 per month) to 12TB ($59.99/£54.99 per month) of storage plus other bonuses might not seem terrible compared to, say, streaming services or a fancy latte, but it’s not nothing. If you have a family using Apple devices and you’re using Family Sharing with an Apple One plan ($25.95/£24.95 per month for 200GB or $37.95/£36.95 a month for 2TB) the cost is more than trivial.
The real question is, can you get what you need without relying on iCloud?
For the purposes of this column, I’m using the sweet spot of 2TB as the basis, since it’s high enough to consider cutting. Signing up for iCloud+ at 2TB is $9.99/£8.99 per month, which can be shared with members of a Family Sharing group; the Apple One Premier plan ($37.95/£36.95 per month) can be used by an individual or Family Sharing group, but it’s the only bundled plan with 2TB. (Family Sharing group members can only access their own storage, but their storage and yours all count towards the total in the iCloud+ storage pool.)
Consider which services you get with iCloud+ that you would lose if you reverted to the free basic 5GB iCloud plan. A full list of associated services can be found on Apple’s site.iCloud Photos
One of iCloud’s big selling points is the ability to sync your photos and videos across all devices, backing them up and copying them as soon as you capture them on a mobile device or import them on a desktop Mac, as well as holding optimized versions of the library to reduce storage on devices. It’s hard to replicate this. You’ll need to regularly import media from mobile devices to a Mac or Windows system to prevent the potential of losing them and ensure you have excellent computer backups so you can restore media later.
One alternative is Google Photos, which can sync mobile photos to its cloud up to the limits of storage paid for via your Google One account. Google offers 2TB for $99.99/£79.99 a year ($8.33/£6.
