You can get unlimited cloud storage for life for less than $100

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The Seagate ST506 from the 1980s cost around $1,700 for its 5 megabyte (MB) capacity, and it wasn’t even the most expensive hard drive of its time. Fortunately, today we have much cheaper (and better) methods of storing data, including uploading data to the cloud. Companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Google are offering great deals on this, but you probably haven’t heard of one of the weirdest and best cloud storage options: buying an original, used Google Pixel phone from 2016.

You can get a terabyte of internal storage from Samsung for around $150, and you can get the same 1TB of storage on a portable external drive for $200. If you don’t mind slower transfer speeds, you can get a hard drive like the Seagate BarraCuda 1TB hard drive for just $100, and you can get an even cheaper deal if you buy a used hard drive. Cloud storage options are fairly similarly priced. You can get a 2TB Google One subscription for $9.99 per month, and Apple iCloud costs the same for a similar plan, with both costing you around $120 per year.

Cloud storage is cheaper up front, while local storage can save you money in the long run. However, both options ultimately pale in comparison to the value a used first-generation Google Pixel phone can bring you. You can easily find one on eBay for just $70. This one-time purchase costs less than a year’s 2TB subscription or even a 2TB hard drive, but provides unlimited storage for life without any compression or quality loss. There are some nuances to this, but all things considered, getting a Google Pixel phone from 2016 might be the best cloud storage option today.

The unlimited cloud storage you get on the Google Pixel 1 is hardware locked. This means that only photos taken with your newly purchased first generation Pixel will not take up any storage space on your Google account, unlike those you upload from your other devices. You can’t just use the same Google account on another phone; instead, you have to actively download files from the Pixel itself.

This presents several challenges. First, the Pixel has a terrible camera by today’s standards; most would not want to store photos taken with this software. If you want to save high-quality images, you will need to transfer files from another device and place them in the DCIM or Camera folder of the first generation Pixel. Also, because the original Pixel is very old, transferring files using a cable is slower than on modern phones using UFS 3.1 or higher. The phone also only supports a maximum storage of 128GB and doesn’t have an SD card slot, which means you can’t transfer all the data at once.

Because the phone is so old, any unit found on a secondary market will have a degrading battery. This problem can be fixed by keeping the phone plugged in all the time, but then the phone can overheat. You can counteract this somewhat by using a phone cooler or even a PC fan. If you really want to get the most out of your Pixel’s free, unlimited cloud storage, you can even use a syncing app like Syncthing or Resilio to make the process much easier, where you can sync the Pixel with your main phone or a desktop computer, download files, and then delete them.

Google promised free storage for life when it released the Pixel 1. You’d imagine that means an obligation for the company, but the specific legality of whether it can change the terms is more nuanced than a simple yes or no. With the release of the first Pixel phone in 2016, Google has continued to honor this over the past decade, and the company is unlikely to suddenly change its mind.

However, there are other cases where Google has changed the details of this promise. All phones from the Google Pixel 2 to the Pixel 6 had certain time limits and restrictions for free unlimited storage, and the feature was completely removed starting with the Pixel 7. Likewise, while the company initially allowed original quality saves, it later changed that to more compressed HD quality – although this didn’t apply to the Pixel 1.

One tip suggesting that Google probably won’t remove this feature comes from an old mistake from 2019, in which the company said that there would no longer be support for unlimited cloud storage on the Pixel after 2020. Google later confirmed that this was an error and that the promise of free storage for life would continue. Given that the feature is gone from other Pixel phones but remains on the original Pixel, there’s probably nothing to worry about.