Is pCloud Lifetime Subscription Worth It? A Must-Read Before Buying! (2024)

If you’re reading this, it probably means that you’ve come across my friend Sam’s pCloud review and you’re seriously considering treating yourself to an account.

We’re not surprised. PCloud takes a tried and tested product and just completely blows it out of the water with improvements, leaving the competition eating serious dust in their wake.

If you told me 10 years ago that I’d be able to securely access my files from anywhere in the world with any of my devices, with 2TB of storage space, be able to roll back a messed up file because of 30 day file tracking and collaborate with others at a touch of a button, I’d spit on the floor, shake my fist at you violently and accuse you of being a snub-nosed liar.

Lucky we didn’t meet 10 years ago, or I’d have to eat my words.

pCloud delivers on everything they say the product does, and more – they’ve given us an option to pay for a LIFETIME subscription, which means we’ll get to enjoy all the perks of a pCloud account in just 1 fixed price.

Thing is, is pCloud’s lifetime subscription really worth it? Let’s find out.

Why did pCloud come out with a lifetime plan?

An annual subscription plan will actually bring pCloud more long term profits, so what does the company gain by giving users the option of paying only once for a lifetime plan?

Honestly, we don’t know.

We’re thinking that pCloud is comprised of a bunch of young, forward-thinking individuals that actually wants to make a difference in the world, instead of having a profit-first mindset.

Realistically, pCloud is still a business and a business needs to maximise profits. Our best guess is that since pCloud is relatively unknown in the market (compared to Dropbox & Google Drive), they’ve come up with these plans to attract new users and gain market share. If this is true, then it’s working – i’ve purchased a plan for myself.

We also suspect that the option to purchase their lifetime subscription plans may not be permanent, so our best advice would be to get it while you still can!

What does the lifetime subscription actually mean?

I think we all know that anything that is given to you “for life” isn’t really for life. We did some digging around in their TOS and discovered that their definition of “for life” is actually 99 years, or whichever is shorter.

This throws a wrench in my plans of passing this account down to my grandchildren as a family heirloom, but I guess that 99 years (or death, whichever comes first) is quite a decent deal.

pCloud lifetime subscription – Plans & Pricing

* Savings are calculated based on the assumption that you signed up for an annual plan and kept it for 5 years.

pCloud’s Lifetime Subscription may look expensive because you’ll have to pay a big sum up front, so we can understand why some people would opt to go for their yearly plan instead.

However, we feel like this is a little bit like leasing vs buying properties; the yearly plan is like leasing (you pay less but the property is never yours to own) while the lifetime subscription is like buying (if the price is right and you like it, why not?)

Anyway, we crunch some numbers to find out. Check out our findings below.

pCloud Premium 500GB

Annually, pCloud’s premium plan costs $49.99 while the lifetime plan costs $200, one time payment. Assuming you keep the annual plan for 5 years, you would have already paid up $249.95, which already far exceeds pCloud’s lifetime subscription plan.

Your savings in 5 years if you pay for the Premium 500GB lifetime plan: $74.95

pCloud Premium Plus 2TB

Get this, the Premium Plus 2TB plan costs $99.99 per year, versus the lifetime subscription of $400. Again, let’s assume you keep the plan for 5 years. With the annual plan, you would have already coughed up a whopping $499.95, while you’ll only have to pay $350 for the lifetime subscription.

Your savings in 5 years if you pay for the Premium Plus 2TB lifetime plan: $149.95

pCloud Family

pCloud’s family plan is only available with a lifetime subscription, but since it lets 5 users share 1 account, we’ll use the family plan vs 5 standalone annual premium 500GB plans.

The family plan is gonna cost you $600, while each premium plan costs $49.99 x 5 which amounts to a grand total of $249.95 per year! In 5 years time, that costs freaking $1249.75, which for some reason is making me a little angry.

Your approx savings in 5 years if you pay for the Family lifetime plan: $749

With these numbers, I think it’s pretty safe to say that while the Lifetime subscriptions might feel like they cost more (due to the high 1 off payment), you’ll actually be paying a whole lot less AND getting more value compared to the annual plans. If you’re planning to stick to pCloud long term, we highly suggest buying one of the lifetime plans.

Additional feature – pCloud Crypto Lifetime

We can all agree that file security is important, but is it worth paying for? After all, our files are already secure in pCloud’s servers.

They already use AES TLS/SSL 256 bit encryption so that if our files are intercepted on the way up to the servers, whoever hijacked it won’t be able to access those files without a key anyway.

So why would we even need pCloud Crypto?

You see, files that are uploaded to pCloud’s servers may enjoy AES encryption on the way up and no one can touch those files, but once they arrive in the servers the files revert back to their original form. Although your files are still secure, the people at pCloud can see what you’ve uploaded.

pCloud Crypto adds an additional layer of security by creating a unique key for you, so that only the person with the key can access those files, keeping them safe from everyone, including pCloud.

Hypothetically speaking, if you’ve got top-secret government data uploaded to pCloud and some terrorist organisation physically hijacks their office, they can force pCloud to hand over the data you’ve uploaded, and use that information for world domination. That’s right, the world is going to hell and it’s your fault, buddy.

With pCloud crypto, even if the most notorious of terrorists pillages pCloud, there is no way they can access your super sensitive private government data, and you would have saved the world from going to hell so now you’re hailed as a hero.

Anyway, let’s talk about the cost.

pCloud Crypto costs $47.88 annually, while the lifetime subscription costs only $125. Over 5 years, you would have saved $114.40. If you’re gonna get pCloud Crypto, do yourself a favour and go for the lifetime version. You’ll be saving so much more.

What could possibly go wrong

Like Sam mentioned in his review, there really isn’t much of a drawback to pCloud’s excellent services. However, we do have a few concerns which we’ll talk about below.

1. What if another company buys over pCloud?

Unlikely to happen, but still a valid concern.

We reached out to the support team over at pCloud (which is outstanding by the way) for comments, and they’ve guaranteed us that they’re not looking to sell the company, but they will honour all lifetime accounts, if anyone decides to buy over their company in the future.

However, we like to be sure so we went through their TOS but unfortunately, we couldn’t find anything related to this at all.

They acknowledged that there wasn’t any literature on this in their TOS, but if the thought made us truly uncomfortable, we can always opt to go for their annual plans. We have to agree.

2. What if there isn’t enough storage space?

2TB of storage space may seem like a lot right now, but file sizes are growing at a rapid rate. In 5 years time, 2TB may not be enough. Will they be upgrading our accounts when the time comes or would we have to purchase more storage space?

What if pCloud decides to create a 5TB account in the future? We’d like to be able to upgrade to that by just paying the difference, but looking at the way things are (you have to pay the full lifetime subscription price even if you have held an annual account for any amount of years) it seems like we’d have to fork out more.

3. Opportunity cost – What if something better comes along?

Oh the FOMO (fear of missing out) is strong in this one.

All of pCloud’s lifetime subscription plans have excellent value, but let’s face it – $175 is not cheap. I can see people opting to pay annually just because they don’t have the $200 up front, but I digress.

The point I’m trying to make is that we’d be paying so much for an account, and 6 months down the road if some other company decides to create a superior product which costs less, we’d feel like we got served the short end of the stick.

We’d end up having to pay for the new, superior product (on top of what we have already paid pCloud) if we want to use their services, and that’s a lot!

Final thoughts – Thumbs up or down?

Okay, here are our thoughts – pCloud’s Lifetime Subscription is freakin’ awesome. The cost savings are just too great to ignore. With the 500GB lifetime plan, you’ll be saving $74.95, compared to paying for an annual account for 5 years (the savings just gets bigger with the 2TB and Family plan).

Sure, we’ve got a few valid concerns (lack of future storage, opportunity cost, fear of pCloud shutting down before we use up our Lifetime benefits) but let’s get real; our concerns are valid, but they’re extremely unlikely to happen.

If it really bothers you, you’re always free to go with the annual plan, and upgrade once you start to feel more secure.

So on behalf of everybody here at Bitcatcha.com, I’m giving pCloud’s Lifetime Subscription plan, two thumbs up. Get it before they smarten up and decide to pull the plan!