pCloud vs Wasabi Comparison 2026
pCloud is a consumer app with streaming playback and a virtual drive, sold as a one-time payment, 2TB for $399 or 10TB for $1,190. Wasabi is raw object storage with no consumer app at all, priced at a flat $7.99 per terabyte a month with no egress or request fees, built for backup software that already speaks the S3 API. At 10TB, pCloud's one-time price pays for itself against Wasabi's monthly rate in under fifteen months, but Wasabi's own listing is clear that anybody storing a few hundred gigabytes is better served by a consumer plan like pCloud's. These serve different scales: pCloud for a creator's working archive, Wasabi for terabytes of footage pulled through existing backup tooling.
At a glance
- Wasabi starts cheaper, at $7.99.
- Neither has a free tier.
Side by side
pCloud | Wasabi | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $199 | From $7.99 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | One-time purchase | Paid subscription |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Billing (they differ) | One-time purchase | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial | Not stated | Not stated |
| API | Not stated | Yes |
pCloud
Cloud storage you buy once and keep
pCloud sells lifetime storage for a single payment, which over five years costs less than any subscription and removes the monthly bill from a creator's overheads. Files stream without downloading first, so a media library stays browsable. The one-time price is real but the encryption add-on is separate, and lifetime means the company's lifetime.
Our note
Lifetime means the company's lifetime, not yours, and that is the whole risk in this purchase. pCloud has been going since 2013, which is longer than most, but do not let it be the only copy of anything you cannot re-shoot.
Wasabi
Object storage at one rate, with no egress fee
Wasabi sells cloud storage as a flat rate per terabyte and charges nothing to get the data back out, which is the line item that makes a bill from the big clouds unpredictable. For an archive of finished footage that gets pulled occasionally, that is the whole calculation. It speaks the same API as S3, so most backup software already knows how to talk to it. There is a minimum retention period, and it is worth reading before moving anything.
Why people weigh these two
- Wasabi instead of pCloud
- Wasabi charges one flat monthly rate with no egress fee, a pay-as-you-go alternative to pCloud's single upfront payment.
- pCloud instead of Wasabi
- pCloud is a single $199 payment instead of a recurring rate, right if you would rather own the space outright than pay Wasabi by the terabyte forever.
Which one should you pick
Pick pCloud if you want an app you actually open: streaming playback, a virtual drive and a one-time price. The 2TB lifetime plan is $399, and the calculation worth doing is how many years of a subscription that price would otherwise cost.
Pick Wasabi if you are sitting on terabytes of finished footage that has outgrown consumer storage and already have backup software that speaks S3. At $7.99 a terabyte a month with no egress charge, it is priced and shaped for volume rather than for a browsable personal library, and there is a minimum retention period worth reading before moving anything in.
Common questions
- Which is cheaper, pCloud or Wasabi, for a large archive?
- At 10TB, pCloud's one-time $1,190 lifetime plan pays for itself against Wasabi's $7.99-a-terabyte monthly rate in under fifteen months. Below a few hundred gigabytes, though, Wasabi's own listing says a consumer plan like pCloud's is the better fit.
- Does Wasabi have a consumer app like pCloud's, with streaming and a virtual drive?
- No, that is not part of what Wasabi offers; it is raw object storage meant to be reached through backup software speaking the S3 API. pCloud's virtual drive and media streaming are built for browsing an archive directly.
- Does pCloud charge extra to download files, the way object storage sometimes does?
- That is not described as a separate charge in pCloud's listing. Wasabi's no-egress promise is its specific differentiator, since getting data back out of the big clouds is normally where an unpredictable bill grows.
- Is Wasabi a one-time purchase like pCloud's lifetime plans?
- No, Wasabi bills monthly at a flat per-terabyte rate with no lifetime option. pCloud offers both: ongoing subscriptions and a one-time lifetime payment that never bills again.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.