The best cloud storage in 2026 depends on how easily you can leave it

Every "best cloud storage" guide ranks the same three things: free space, monthly price, security. Not one of them measures the number that actually traps you.

The comparison everyone runs

Open any "best cloud storage in 2026" roundup and you'll find the same table — free tier, entry price, a security note, a sentence on who it's for. It's a fine starting point, so here's the short version:

Service	Free tier	Entry paid plan	Known for
Google Drive	15 GB	$1.99/mo · 100 GB	Workspace integration
OneDrive	5 GB	$1.99/mo · 100 GB	Microsoft 365 bundle
iCloud+	5 GB	$0.99/mo · 50 GB	Apple devices
Dropbox	2 GB	$11.99/mo · 2 TB	Sharing & collaboration
pCloud	10 GB	Lifetime plans	One-time pricing, streaming
Proton Drive	5 GB	Paid from 200 GB	Swiss end-to-end encryption
TeraBox	1 TB	$3.49/mo · 2 TB	Huge free tier

(Advertised entry pricing as of early 2026 — providers change tiers constantly, so treat it as a snapshot, not gospel.)

It's a useful way to pick where to start. It tells you almost nothing about what happens next.

The metric the table doesn't have

Here's the column no roundup includes: what does it cost to leave?

Because you will. You'll hit the ceiling on a free tier. A subscription price will jump. A company will get acquired, sunset a plan, or change its privacy terms. Whether that's a shrug or a lost weekend has nothing to do with how cheap the storage was — it comes down to how hard your data is to move out.

And on every service in that table, the default answer is identical: download everything to your laptop, then upload it all somewhere else. That's slow, and it's lossy. Folder structures flatten. Shared links break. "Last modified" dates reset to today. Anything you'd carefully organized gets scrambled in transit.

The bandwidth is the part people underestimate. On a typical home connection — call it 50 Mbps up — pushing 500 GB back into the cloud takes about 22 hours, and that's before the download leg. Two terabytes is the better part of a week with your laptop pinned to one task. The "free" tier was never the expensive part.

Lock-in is the actual product

Once you see it you can't unsee it: generous free tiers and cheap entry plans aren't generosity, they're an on-ramp. The longer you stay, the more data accumulates, and the more painful leaving becomes — which is exactly what lets a provider raise prices or trim features later. The switching cost is the moat. It's how a 2 GB free tier can still hold someone hostage years on.

So the "best cloud storage" question is framed wrong. The free tier and the monthly price are the visible numbers. The one that actually governs your freedom — switching cost — is invisible, and it's the only one the provider works to keep high.

What "easy to leave" actually looks like

The fix isn't finding the one perfect cloud. It's refusing to let any of them trap you — by treating cloud-to-cloud movement as something you do on demand instead of a once-a-decade ordeal.

That's the entire reason we built Whimsy. It connects to your accounts — Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive, S3, SFTP, WebDAV — and moves files between them directly through each provider's own API. The bytes go cloud to cloud. They never round-trip through your laptop, and they never touch our servers.

What that changes in practice:

No re-download. A 500 GB move that would've pinned your home connection for a day runs server-side at provider speeds instead.
Structure survives. Folders, names, and hierarchy move intact rather than collapsing into one download blob.
It's resumable. Big migrations run in the background, in parallel, and pick up where they left off instead of dying at 90%.
Zero file access. Whimsy reads only the metadata it needs to move things — never the contents.

Browser-direct transfers are live now for Google Drive, Dropbox, and OneDrive, with the other connectors close behind.

So which cloud is best?

Whichever one fits today — as long as you keep the exit cheap. Pick the free tier you like. Take the lifetime deal. Chase the cheapest 2 TB plan. Just stop treating any of it as permanent, because the moment moving between clouds is a routine background job instead of a lost weekend, the scariest number in every comparison table quietly drops to zero.

That's the real upgrade. Not more storage — the freedom to leave.

Whimsy is open for early testing at whimsy.numeracode.com. Connect your clouds, browse them like one folder, and move files between them without the download-reupload tax.

#switching-cost

Best Cloud Storage in 2026: Watch Switching Cost