pCloud Drive

pCloud is a Swiss cloud storage service (pCloud AG, Baar) whose distinguishing feature is that you can buy storage once instead of renting it. Lifetime plans run EUR 219 for 500 GB, EUR 499 for 2 TB and EUR 1,499 for 10 TB, against annual prices of EUR 279, EUR 709 and EUR 2,799 — so a lifetime plan pays for itself inside a year at the larger sizes. Customers choose at sign-up whether their files live in Europe or the United States.

The desktop client is a virtual drive rather than a sync folder: files appear in the file manager and stream on demand, so a 2 TB account does not need 2 TB of local disk. Sharing links, download links with expiry, and restoring previous versions from up to 30 days back are included.

Two things to know before treating it as a Dropbox replacement. End-to-end encryption, pCloud Encryption, is a paid add-on rather than a default — files are encrypted at rest and in transit without it, but zero-knowledge is extra. And there is no third-party app ecosystem, so the collaboration integrations that pull teams toward Dropbox or Google Drive have no counterpart here.

pCloud is operated by pCloud International AG, a company registered in Switzerland with its registered office at 74 Zugerstrasse, 6340 Baar, in the canton of Zug. Its terms place the contract under Swiss law, with Swiss law expressly disapplied for European Union users. The company says it was founded in 2013 and employs more than 60 people, serving 22 million users in more than 130 countries; none of those figures is filed, and the Swiss commercial register’s public API now requires credentials, so the entity rests on the vendor’s own binding terms.

The data does not sit in Switzerland. pCloud asks you to choose a region before sign-up and offers exactly two: the European Union, where the data centre is in Luxembourg, and the United States, in Dallas, Texas. Files, account metadata and backups stay in the region chosen. What is Swiss is the company and the law its terms name, not the storage.

The catalogue is pCloud Drive for storage and sync, pCloud Crypto for client-side zero-knowledge encryption, pCloud Pass for passwords, and Transfer and Save as free side tools. Encryption is the line a buyer needs to read: ordinary folders are encrypted in transit and at rest but readable by the service, and zero-knowledge applies only to the paid Crypto folder. pCloud also sells one-off lifetime plans rather than only subscriptions, which moves the risk from monthly billing onto the company’s own longevity.