pCloud Drive
Cloud Drive Switzerland
European cloud storage with secure sharing and optional encryption. Alternative to Dropbox, Google Drive, and OneDrive.
Details
pCloud is a Swiss cloud storage service (pCloud AG, Baar) whose distinguishing feature is that you can buy storage once instead of renting it. Lifetime plans run EUR 219 for 500 GB, EUR 499 for 2 TB and EUR 1,499 for 10 TB, against annual prices of EUR 279, EUR 709 and EUR 2,799 — so a lifetime plan pays for itself inside a year at the larger sizes. Customers choose at sign-up whether their files live in Europe or the United States.
The desktop client is a virtual drive rather than a sync folder: files appear in the file manager and stream on demand, so a 2 TB account does not need 2 TB of local disk. Sharing links, download links with expiry, and restoring previous versions from up to 30 days back are included.
Two things to know before treating it as a Dropbox replacement. End-to-end encryption, pCloud Encryption, is a paid add-on rather than a default — files are encrypted at rest and in transit without it, but zero-knowledge is extra. And there is no third-party app ecosystem, so the collaboration integrations that pull teams toward Dropbox or Google Drive have no counterpart here.
