How to choose a cloud drive — compare on what you actually care about
This page is not an "us vs them" table. Whoever builds that table picks the columns and wins it — and you know that. So each item below starts with how to judge it, which you can apply to any provider, including us.
How to use this: circle the two or three items you actually care about and ignore the rest. Most people end up caring about exactly two things — whether there is enough space, and whether it is annoying to use.
Compare on these six
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How much free space
Check whether it is granted on sign-up or earned through daily tasks, and whether earned space expires. Space accumulated by checking in daily often comes with an expiry date.
Us: 15 GB, granted on sign-up. No tasks to complete, and it does not expire.
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Largest single file you can upload
Many services cap free accounts at 2 GB or 5 GB per file, and that limit is usually buried deep in a help page — you find out halfway through an upload.
Us: No fixed per-file cap; large files go up in chunks. What actually limits you is your remaining space, not the size of one file.
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Is downloading throttled
Watch for two phrasings: "free accounts are rate-limited" and "full speed requires the desktop client". The second one is also throttling, just worded differently.
Us: No throttling for free accounts, and no paid fast lane either. If it is slow at peak times that is the bandwidth itself, not a cap we imposed.
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Can you use it without installing anything
Check whether PDFs, video, PSD and Office documents preview right in the browser, and whether you can edit them there. Also check whether uploading and downloading needs a desktop client at all.
Us: 37 online tools, nothing to install. Most of them run entirely in your browser, so those files never reach a server.
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Can you plug in your own storage
Most drives only store files on their own servers. If you already have an S3 bucket or a NAS at home, check whether you can mount it and manage everything in one place.
Us: You can mount your own S3, SFTP, FTP, WebDAV or GCS. Credentials are encrypted before being stored, and everything appears in the same interface.
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Can you get your data back out
Check whether a whole folder can be downloaded as one archive, and watch for limits like "export requires the desktop app" or "bulk download N times per day". Exit cost is the item people overlook most.
Us: Yes — a whole folder downloads as a single archive, with no cap on how often.
What we do not have
These are listed here because the later you find out, the more it costs you:
- No desktop sync folder. Nothing runs in the background syncing a folder the way Dropbox or OneDrive does — you upload and download in the browser.
- No native mobile app. The site works fine in a phone browser, but there is nothing of ours in the app stores.
- No team spaces or collaboration permissions. This is a personal drive: no members, no roles, no shared team folders.
- No version history for ordinary files. Editor projects keep version records, but if you overwrite an ordinary file with the same name, the previous version is gone. For anything important, save under a new name instead of overwriting.
When you should not pick us
In these three cases another service genuinely suits you better — this is not politeness:
- You want set-and-forget desktop syncing. Something built for sync, like Dropbox or OneDrive, fits better.
- You need team collaboration, member permissions and shared folders. We built a personal drive.
- You store work files that get overwritten daily and you rely on rolling back versions. Ordinary files here have no version history.
If none of that applies to you
Then do not sign up yet — the 37 online tools work the moment you open them. Come back and register when you actually need somewhere to keep files.