Cheapest Dropbox alternatives for a single user
Dropbox Plus is $9.99/month for 2TB, single user. Free tiers, a yearly-only competitor that undercuts it, and four products still missing confirmed prices in our research.
Updated 2026-09-12 · prices verified against official pages
Dropbox's single-user math
Our scenario: single user, monthly billing. Dropbox's Basic plan is free with 2GB of storage. Plus is $9.99/month for 2TB (2,000GB), with 30 days to restore deleted files, file transfers up to 50GB, and 3 e-signature requests a month included. Standard is $15/user/month and, per Dropbox's own plan description, is available 'for 1 person or more' — starting at 3TB, 180-day file restore and 3 signature requests a month — so a single user could pay for Standard, though at 50% more than Plus for the same-shaped feature set plus more storage. Advanced is $24/user/month starting at 15TB with end-to-end encryption and SSO, aimed at teams of 3 or more. For one person, Plus at $9.99/month for 2TB is the number to beat.
Box: a much bigger free tier, a smaller paid one
Box's free Individual plan gives 10GB — five times Dropbox's 2GB — plus 5 Box Sign e-signature requests a month, though its per-file upload cap is only 250MB. Its paid single-user tier, Personal Pro, is $16/month ($11.50/month billed annually) for 100GB, a 5GB file upload limit and 15 signature requests a month. That's more expensive than Dropbox Plus for a fraction of the storage (100GB vs. 2TB) and a smaller per-file limit (5GB vs. Dropbox Plus's 50GB transfer limit) — Box's free tier undercuts Dropbox's free tier on storage; its paid tier does not undercut Dropbox Plus on price.
pCloud: cheaper than Dropbox, but yearly-only
pCloud has no monthly billing option in our data and no free plan at all — every price is an annual payment. Premium is $49.99/year for 500GB (about $4.17/month equivalent), Premium Plus is $99.99/year for 2TB (about $8.33/month equivalent — the same storage as Dropbox Plus for less, if you're willing to pay the full year upfront), and Ultra is $299.99/year for 10TB (about $25/month equivalent). There's no way to pay pCloud monthly, so the comparison to Dropbox's $9.99/month only holds if annual billing works for you.
Free tiers worth knowing about
Proton Drive's Free plan gives 5GB — more than double Dropbox's 2GB — with end-to-end encryption and a built-in document and spreadsheet editor. Internxt's Free plan gives 1GB with no email verification required to sign up. MEGA also has a free plan, though the storage amount didn't render on the page we captured, so we can't state a number for it; the page does confirm it bundles video calling (up to 1 hour, 100 participants) and 30-day view-only file history alongside whatever storage it includes. Sync.com has a free 'starter' plan too, but its storage allowance wasn't shown either — Proton Drive and Internxt are the two with a confirmed free-tier storage number.
Where the research runs out
Four products in this category still have no confirmed capability data, so per our own rules we can only name them by price, not by feature. Internxt's paid tiers are billed as one-time lifetime payments, but the actual amounts didn't render on the page we captured — a real gap, not a $0 price. We do know what each tier would include: Essential (1TB, 10GB per-file limit), Premium (3TB, 50GB per-file limit) and Ultimate (5TB, 100GB per-file limit), each with a longer trash-retention window at higher tiers — just not what they'd cost. Proton Drive's paid tiers (Drive Plus 200GB, Unlimited 500GB, Duo 2TB for 2 users, Family 3TB for 6 users, Professional 1TB/user) have the same problem: known storage amounts, no confirmed price. Sync.com's Teams plans show promotional numbers in the page copy (roughly $4-9/user/month) but our research flagged the currency as unconfirmed — no currency code was shown, and the page may be pricing in CAD rather than USD — so we're not stating those as fact. Until those are re-verified, Dropbox Plus, Box Individual and pCloud remain the only single-user cloud storage prices in this category we can compare with confidence.
Every claim above links back to computed comparisons with sourced, dated pricing.
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