New iCloud Plans and Pricing

In concert with the release of iOS 9 on September 16, 2015, Apple also released the new iCloud plans and pricing announced at the media event a week earlier.

Under the new options, iCloud still offers 5GB of free storage. If that isn’t enough for your needs, a 50GB iCloud plan is only $0.99 per moth, which is more than double the capacity for the same price as the old 20GB plan.

The 200 GB iCloud plan has dropped in price from $3.99 per month to $2.99 per month.

The 500GB iCloud plan is no longer being listed and it appears that is no longer an option.

Finally, a 1TB iCloud plan has dropped in price from $19.99 to only $9.99.

For those of you that already have a plan in effect, the new pricing and capacity will automatically apply.

While these new iCloud plans and pricing are very attractive, they may not be the best deal, depending on your needs.

If your primary goal is to get free storage, you may want to look at Google Drive or Microsoft’s OneDrive. Both of those services offer a whopping 15GB of storage, free of charge. Beyond that, for each friend you invite to sign up for those services, you get an additional 1GB of storage.

Probably the best known service is Dropbox, which offers a mere 2GB of free storage but also allows additional storage for inviting friends to open an account up to a total of 16GB.

At the other end of the spectrum is the 1TB plans, which are offered by all of the services mentioned above but Microsoft’s OneDrive seems to offer the best deal. For $6.99 per moth you get 1TB of storage plus a subscription to Office 365.

So which deal is best for you?

We still think the tight integration iCloud provides, is a definite advantage, especially with the addition of an iCloud icon with the release of iOS 9. With most, if not all Mac/iOS users now also having access to Apple’s Pages, Numbers and Keynote, the iCloud service is a strong contender.

If Microsoft Office is a primary focus for you, OneDrive seems like an obvious choice, especially given the lower pricing.

In the end, any of these services will service you well and in many cases people use a combination of them to maximize their available storage and minimize their monthly expenses. To learn more about iCloud features and plans visit the Apple information page here.

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