pCloud pricing in the UK 2026: annual or lifetime, what it costs in euros, and when the single payment pays off

These are the personal rates shown on pCloud's own pricing page on 16 September 2026. The annual column is a charge for a full year, not a monthly fee you pay off in instalments. The three-year column adds three equal charges as a comparison, not as a contractual promise about future prices.

And the part a UK buyer meets before any of the arithmetic: the page prices in euros and offers no currency selector. Whatever the figure says, what leaves a British account is that amount converted by your card issuer on the day, and many UK cards add a non-sterling transaction fee on top. On an annual plan that is an irritation. On a single payment of several hundred it is worth checking your own card's terms before you press buy.

Take 2 TB annually view ›: that is €99.99 today. Dividing it by twelve helps you compare budgets but changes nothing about the bill. Cancelling the renewal keeps your access until the paid period ends, and that is not the same thing as asking for a refund. pCloud's billing help page sets out the difference.

The first annual charge that reaches or passes the single payment is also the fifth one for 500 GB and for 10 TB without extras. At 500 GB, five instalments come to €249.95 against €219.00. At 10 TB, they come to €1,499.95 against €1,499.00. These are nominal comparisons at today's rates: they do not discount what you could do with the money you keep, and they do not predict price changes.

For an uncertain period we would take the annual plan. For several years of use you have already proved, the lifetime plan can make sense if its capacity will still be enough and the outlay does not stretch you. In the calculator we treat a gap of up to 1 % of the single payment as a dead heat and favour flexibility: that is a visible editorial criterion, not a pCloud condition.

This is the question that sits underneath the whole search, and the reviews that rank for it tend to skip past: whether a company you have paid once will still be there in eight years. Nobody can answer that, ours included, so the honest thing is to read what the company itself commits to.

Two facts from its own documents. Lifetime describes the payment model, not a promise that the business will run for 99 years. Its official definition is the lifetime of the account holder or 99 years, whichever is shorter, and its terms of service contemplate modifying or suspending the service and recommend keeping your own copies of your data. And the pricing page advertises a 14-day money-back window, while the terms require a written request and carry an exception for promotional or discounted purchases, which is what a lifetime plan usually is.

If you hold 250 GB and add 50 GB a year, in three years you reach 400 GB. With an optional 20 % of headroom the forecast is 480 GB, so 500 GB is still enough. Start at 450 GB with the same growth and you reach 600 GB even without headroom. That is where the step up to 2 TB view › answers a real need rather than a worry.

The calculator picks a capacity that covers the whole horizon from day one. That is what makes the two payment models comparable, but it does not model a strategy of starting at 500 GB and upgrading later. If you are close to a tier boundary, check the real upgrade terms before paying years of service in advance.

The virtual drive lets you work with files kept in the cloud, according to the service documentation. Anything you want available offline needs local space. Having 2 TB on the account does not create 2 TB inside the phone. Before a trip, pick and download the folders you are genuinely going to need.

Personal storage includes encryption in transit and on the servers. Crypto, also sold as pCloud Encryption, adds client-side encryption for the files inside its Crypto folder. It does not silently convert the whole account. Its official rate, in euros like everything else, is €49.99 a year or €150.00 as a single payment, on top of the storage.

There is one concrete incompatibility that changes the purchase: the Crypto folder is not available over WebDAV, according to pCloud's own WebDAV help page. If your backup software or your NAS depends on that protocol, the space can fit and the way of working will not. The same document advises against WebDAV for very large transfers because of possible interruptions.

Keep your Crypto Pass somewhere you can genuinely recover it from: pCloud states that it cannot restore it if you lose it. If you need somewhere to keep keys like that, our password manager guide covers where they should live. Do not confuse the account password with the key to its encrypted folder.

A 5 GB video downloaded in full a hundred times moves about 500 GB. That sum explains why anyone distributing large files needs to look at traffic and not just space. Going over the limit affects the recipients' access depending on their account type; it does not mean your files disappear. Nor do we read "no file size limit" as unlimited total capacity.

Two more things worth writing down before a single payment. We would not price a Family plan per person by assuming every seat gets used: note how many you will genuinely fill and how many GB each one needs. And if this is a work team rather than a household, compare permissions, administration and Business requirements separately, because reviews of the personal plan do not establish what the business one does.

It is the second thing people ask about this service, and the honest answer has two halves. Yes, there is a free account, and it is not a time-limited trial. pCloud offers up to 10 GB at no cost, subject to the actions that unlock the later portions of that allowance, which is why the figure you see quoted varies depending on who is writing.

And the half that decides: 10 GB is a sample, not a plan. It is the right size for checking three things before you commit to years of service, and those three things are exactly what a review cannot check for you. Whether the desktop client behaves on your machine. Whether the phone app uploads your camera roll the way you expect. And whether the download route back out works, which is the one worth testing first because it is the one you will need in the worst week.

What the free tier does not include is the thing this page is about: the capacity. Nothing in the free account tells you whether you need 500 GB or 2 TB, and that answer comes from measuring your own folders, which is what the calculator above does.