The Best Cloud Storage for a Small Business

Compare the headline numbers and business cloud storage looks like terrible value.

Microsoft 365 Family is up to 6TB for $129.99 a year across six people. Dropbox Standard is $15 per user per month. Five people on Dropbox Standard is $900 a year for a team allocation starting at 3TB — seven times the price for half the storage.

If capacity were what you were buying, nobody would ever buy a team plan. Capacity is not what you are buying.

What a business plan is actually for

Three things, none of which appear in a gigabyte figure.

Revocation. When someone leaves, one switch ends their access to everything. On a consumer plan shared among staff there is no such switch — the files were shared to personal accounts, and taking them back means remembering every folder anyone was ever added to.

Ownership. On a business plan the company owns the files. On a consumer plan the individual does, which becomes a genuine problem when the individual with the account is the one who has just left badly.

Recovery and visibility. Longer windows for restoring deleted files, and an admin view of who has access to what. The second one sounds bureaucratic until a client asks you who can see their data.

If none of those apply — a business of one or two, no staff turnover, no client data obligations — then a consumer plan is genuinely the right answer and the rest of this page is about a problem you do not have.

Microsoft 365 — the value answer if you use Office

Microsoft's consumer pricing, checked 31 August 2026:

The observation worth making: if your business already pays for Word, Excel and Outlook, the storage is arriving anyway. A terabyte per person is more than most document-based businesses will use in a decade, and you are not paying anything additional for it.

For a genuine business you want the Business tiers rather than Family, which add the admin controls above and company ownership of the data. But it is worth understanding the consumer arithmetic first, because it tells you what you are paying the difference for — and for a two-person operation, Family at $129.99 a year is a defensible choice that many small businesses quietly make.

The weakness is sync. OneDrive's file syncing has historically been the least reliable of the major services on mixed platforms, and if half your team is on Macs that is a daily irritation rather than an abstract one.

Dropbox — the one whose sync you stop thinking about

Dropbox is the most expensive option here and the one that most reliably does the boring thing correctly. Files sync. They sync on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android, quickly, and conflicts are handled sensibly rather than by silently keeping the wrong version.

In a business where several people edit the same files, that reliability is the product. The cost of bad sync is not measured in frustration — it is measured in the afternoon somebody spends reconciling two versions of a proposal.

Note the three-person minimum on Advanced. A two-person business wanting Advanced's features pays for three seats.

Dropbox's free Basic tier is 2GB, the smallest free allowance of any major service. It is not a serious option for anything.

Google Workspace — the default if you already live in Drive

Every Google account includes up to 15GB free, shared across Drive, Gmail and Photos, which is why so many small businesses start here without deciding to.

Google One's paid consumer tiers run 100GB, 200GB, and larger plans bundled with AI features at 5TB and from 20TB. Google did not display prices on the plans page when we checked, so we are not quoting figures. Paid plans can be shared with up to 5 other people at no extra cost, six including you.

For a business the relevant product is Google Workspace rather than Google One, which adds company-owned accounts, admin controls and business email on your own domain.

The strength is collaborative editing, which remains genuinely better than the alternatives — several people in one document at once, without the version conflicts that plague file-based workflows. If your work is mostly created rather than stored, that matters more than storage capacity.

pCloud — the only one you can buy once

pCloud sells lifetime plans as a single payment: Premium 500GB at $199 (regular $299), Premium Plus 2TB at $399 (regular $599), and Ultra 10TB at $1,190 (regular $1,890).

The arithmetic is worth doing. 2TB from Dropbox Plus at $9.99 a month is roughly $120 a year, so pCloud's $399 lifetime plan pays for itself in a little over three years and is free thereafter.

Two honest caveats. "Lifetime" means the lifetime of the company, which is a real risk to price into a decision measured in decades. And pCloud's team and admin features are less developed than the incumbents', so this is better suited to a business storing files than to one collaborating on them daily.

Proton Drive — end-to-end encryption as the point

Proton Drive's free tier is 5GB. Paid tiers run Drive Plus at 200GB, Proton Unlimited at 500GB bundled with VPN, Mail, Calendar and Pass, Proton Duo at 2TB for up to 2 users, and Proton Family at 3TB for up to 6 users. Drive Professional offers 1TB per user for business. Prices did not render on the pricing page when we checked.

The reason to consider it is end-to-end encryption by default, which for a business handling client confidential material — legal, medical, financial — is a substantive position rather than a marketing one. It is also something you can put in writing to a client.

The trade is collaboration. Encrypted-by-default storage does not do simultaneous document editing the way Google does, and that is a consequence of the architecture rather than a missing feature.

The thing everyone forgets to budget for

None of the products above is a backup.

Sync means changes propagate. Delete a file on your laptop and it is deleted in the cloud. Encrypt every file with ransomware and the encrypted versions sync up cheerfully. A member of staff clearing out "old" folders on their last week does so for everyone.

Every service here keeps deleted files for some window, which is a partial safety net rather than a backup, and the windows are shorter than people assume.

Backblaze Computer Backup is $99 a year per computer for unlimited data backup, with a free trial. That is roughly $8 a month per machine to make the difference between "we lost a file" and "we lost a year." For a small business it is the cheapest insurance on this page, and the distinction is worth understanding properly — cloud storage vs backup.

Choosing

• Already paying for Office: Microsoft 365 Business. The storage is included in something you buy anyway.
• Sync reliability matters most, mixed Macs and PCs: Dropbox Standard at $15 a user.
• Work is collaborative documents: Google Workspace.
• Storing rather than collaborating, want to stop paying: pCloud lifetime, $399 for 2TB.
• Client confidentiality is part of your pitch: Proton Drive.
• Whatever you choose: add a real backup, around $99 a year per machine.

Before committing, check what you actually use — most small businesses buy several times the storage they need, and the answer is in how much cloud storage do I need. The two products most teams weigh against each other are covered in Dropbox vs OneDrive, and the full cost picture, including the per-terabyte comparison, is in what cloud storage actually costs.