pCloud vs Internxt: the €1.99 renews at €9.99

What the record says

Internxt's pricing page opens on Lifetime, showing €380, €580 and €780 as one-time payments for 1 TB, 3 TB and 5 TB. Switch to Annual and you get €1.99, €3.99 and €5.99 a month, which looks extraordinarily cheap for encrypted storage. Directly beneath each of those figures the page prints the catch in its own words: 'Annual plan, billed at €1.99 for the first month, then renews at €9.99/mo.' The same sentence appears under all three plans with the numbers changed — €3.99 then €19.99, €5.99 then €29.99.

We want to be fair about this: Internxt discloses it, on the plan card, unprompted. That is more than some vendors do. But the number in large type is the one that goes into comparisons, and it is one fifth of what you will pay from month two. The recurring cost of Internxt Essential is €119.88 a year, not the €23.88 that €1.99 a month implies.

pCloud's page works differently and it is worth spelling out because the two look superficially similar. It has a three-way switch — Monthly, Annual, Lifetime — and it opens on Annual. Each paid state shows a struck-through figure beside the live price. On the annual state that struck figure is not an old price or a renewal rate: €59.88 beside €49.99 on the 500 GB plan is simply twelve months at the €4.99 monthly rate. So the strike-through is doing honest work, showing you what paying monthly would cost. Annual saves about 16.6% on every tier and nothing renews upward.

Now the recurring comparison, using Internxt's real renewal rates rather than its advertised ones. pCloud's 2 TB plan is €99.99 a year. Internxt's nearest tier is 3 TB at €239.88 a year. Per terabyte that is €50.00 against €79.96 — pCloud is 60% cheaper per unit of storage. Go up the ladder and the gap widens: pCloud's 10 TB tier is €299.99 a year, or €30.00 per terabyte, against Internxt's 5 TB at €71.98. On recurring price for storage alone this is not close.

The lifetime maths is where it gets genuinely interesting, and it inverts. pCloud's lifetime prices are €199, €399 and €1,190, which work out at almost exactly four years of its own annual rate on every tier — 3.98, 3.99 and 3.97 years. That consistency is a deliberate pricing rule, not a coincidence. Internxt's lifetime plans pay back faster against its own annual rate: 3.17 years on Essential, 2.42 on Premium, 2.17 on Ultimate. But that is not Internxt being generous with lifetime; it is Internxt's subscription being expensive, so the one-time price clears it sooner.

Compare the lifetime prices to each other rather than to their own subscriptions and the picture changes again. Per terabyte paid once: pCloud is €199.50 at 2 TB and €119 at 10 TB; Internxt is €193.33 at 3 TB and €156 at 5 TB. So Internxt's mid and upper lifetime tiers are competitive, and its 5 TB at €156 per TB beats pCloud's 2 TB. Only pCloud's 10 TB tier, at €119 per TB, is decisively the cheapest way to buy storage once on either page.

What you get beyond storage is the real argument for Internxt. Every one of its personal plans includes an encrypted VPN and antivirus, plus post-quantum and zero-knowledge encryption, two-factor authentication and computer backup. pCloud's plans include neither VPN nor antivirus — its password manager, pCloud Pass, is sold separately and is not part of these figures. If you were going to pay for a VPN anyway, that changes the arithmetic in a way no per-terabyte figure captures.

One pCloud detail worth knowing before you buy the big tier. Shared link traffic is metered separately from storage and does not scale with it: the 10 TB plan carries the same 2 TB of shared link traffic as the 2 TB plan. If you are using cloud storage to distribute files rather than to keep them, the ceiling you hit first may not be the one you paid to raise.