Five Gigabytes Is Not a Phone Backup

Both platforms hand you a free allowance smaller than the thing it is meant to hold. Apple gives 5GB. Google gives up to 15GB. A modern phone full of photographs does not reliably back up into either.

Which means the storage decision is not made when you buy the phone. It is made during setup, by whoever is holding it, usually on the day they were given it.

The two ladders

Step	iCloud+	A year	Google One	A year
Free	5 GB	—	up to 15 GB	—
1	50 GB	$11.88	100 GB	$23.88
2	200 GB	$35.88	400 GB	$59.88
3	2 TB	$119.88	2 TB	$119.88

Each company’s published US monthly price times twelve, read 5 September 2026. Capacity is the total across that provider’s services, not per app.

Google gives more at every step, then stops

Below the top tier the pattern is consistent: Google gives roughly double the capacity for roughly double the price, so the cost per gigabyte is close, and gives three times the free allowance for nothing.

At 2 TB the two converge exactly, to the cent. $9.99 a month on both, $119.88 a year on both. Two companies with different cost structures, different customers and different reasons to want you in the ecosystem arriving at an identical number is a pricing decision, not an accident.

The comparison is not quite like for like any more

Worth saying plainly, because it cuts against the neat table above. Google’s middle tiers are no longer storage products. Its 400 GB and 2 TB plans are sold as Google AI Plus and carry Gemini usage allowances alongside the gigabytes.

So a household comparing $59.88 against Apple’s $35.88 is not comparing storage to storage. It is comparing storage to storage-plus-an-AI-quota, which may be worth the difference or may be a bundle for something they were never going to use. Our page on what phone AI features cost sets out that side separately.

Why this matters most on a gift

A phone handed over on Christmas Day runs setup once, and setup asks for a backup. The free tier will accept the account and then fill, quietly, over the following weeks, and the first symptom is a phone that has stopped backing up without saying so loudly.

That is the moment the subscription gets bought — under mild pressure, without comparison, at whatever tier is offered first. Deciding in advance costs nothing and takes a minute.

What to actually do

• Check the used storage on the old phone before you set up the new one. That number, not the marketing, tells you which step you need.
• Skip step one on Apple. 50 GB is above the free tier and below a photo library, which is the worst of both.
• Compare at the tier you actually need, not at the top. The two ladders are identical at 2 TB and are not identical anywhere below it.
• Count it as a recurring cost, because it is one. It belongs on the same list as everything else in the house that needs a subscription.
• Do the account housekeeping first if the phone is a hand-me-down, or the storage question will not be the one that stops you.