My favorite Apple product is my iPhone. I specifically buy the iPhone for the camera capabilities so I take thousands of photos and hundreds of video clips each year. And each year, I have found myself with ever growing needs for storage from Apple iCloud to store my videos and photos so I did the math and discovered I would be forking over higher and higher subscription fees for iCloud storage. I’m sure that’s Apple’s business model to squeeze more money out of their customers but they won’t be getting that from me anymore.
iCloud+ Fees
Here, as of November 2023, is a breakdown of the iCloud+ fees.
5 GB – Free
50 GB – $0.99/month or $12/year
200 GB – $3.75/month or $44.99/year
2 TB – $9.99/month or $120/year
6 TB – $29.99/month or $360/year
12 TB – $59.99/month or $719.88/year
I was falling into the 6TB range and paying a whopping $360/year which means over 10 years would be about $3600 assuming no rise in prices.
The Solution
I decided to buy my own cloud storage unit and I selected a Synology DS1522+ which has 5 drives outfitted with 8 TB in RAID 5 which gives me 19 TB of my own cloud storage. I paid about $1200 total for the NAS and the drives needed to fill the bays.
I chose Synology because they have their own apps for photo cloud storage, a cloud “drive” and other apps that make it very easy to use and I only pay for it once and use as much as I need without any subscription fees. My Synology also has an app to backup all my computers, laptops and other devices so that if the drive fails, I can recover the data.
In essence, this unit pays for itself after about a year and a half at Apple’s highest subscription tier of $720/year.
It’s great having my own cloud because I am now working to share this with my wife and other family members to save even more on subscription fees. Of course, if you don’t want to buy your own Synology device, you can always explore alternative cloud storage companies and I’m sure over time there will be more competition but for now I’m happy to have removed the Apple tax.
