iCloud+ stops at 12 TB. There is no plan above it.
Apple sells one top tier and then the ladder ends. 12 TB for €59.99/month is the most storage you can buy, and there is no upgrade button past it. If your photo library, ProRes footage, or family archive keeps growing, Apple's only real answer is to delete things. For a heavy user, 12 TB isn't a generous ceiling. It's a wall you eventually hit and can't climb.
The people who reach 12 TB are precisely the people who keep generating data — a photographer shooting RAW all year, a household pooling fifteen years of 4K. The plan that was supposed to be "the big one" becomes the plan you've already outgrown.
What iCloud+ actually costs at each tier
Here is the full ladder, in euros (the eurozone numbers track the dollar figures):
- 5 GB — free, no iCloud+ features
- 50 GB —
€0.99/mo - 200 GB —
€2.99/mo - 2 TB —
€9.99/mo - 6 TB —
€29.99/mo - 12 TB —
€59.99/mo
At the top, that's about €5.00 per TB — genuinely cheap. Credit where it's due: per terabyte, iCloud at the end of its ladder undercuts almost everyone, us included. The problem was never the price of the 12 TB tier. The problem is that 12 TB is where it stops.
There's one workaround, and it's worth being honest about. Stack Apple One Premier (which bundles 2 TB) with a 12 TB iCloud+ add-on, and a family can pool roughly 14 TB. But it's a kludge: you juggle multiple Apple IDs, log in and out of a "purchasing" account to attach storage to the family organizer, and pay for 2 TB you can lose access to in the shuffle. Two extra terabytes through a setup most people configure wrong. Not headroom.
The other thing the price hides: Apple holds the keys
Cost is half the story. By default, iCloud is not zero-knowledge — Apple can read most of what you store. Advanced Data Protection exists and does end-to-end encrypt the majority of iCloud categories, but it ships off, you have to turn it on, and even with it enabled, Mail, Contacts, and Calendar stay outside the E2E envelope because they interoperate with the open email and CalDAV/CardDAV world. We laid out exactly what Apple can and can't read in our honest Beebeeb-vs-iCloud comparison, alongside a wider rundown of private alternatives to iCloud, instead of hand-waving it here.
So the heavy iCloud user runs into two ceilings at once: a hard cap on capacity, and a default trust model where the provider can decrypt the files you're paying it to store. Buying the 12 TB plan fixes neither.
What "scaling past 12 TB" actually means
Beebeeb has no top tier to slam into. Storage scales by the terabyte: up to 99 TB self-serve at +€10.99 per extra TB, with a custom quote beyond that. Not "unlimited" — that's the lie every storage company tells, and we won't. But 99 TB self-serve is more than eight times Apple's wall, and you add capacity by clicking, not by migrating to a competitor.
The plans:
- Starter —
€1.99/mo, 100 GB - Basic —
€3.99/mo, 200 GB - Pro —
€10.99/mo, 1 TB, scaling to 99 TB self-serve - Teams —
€54.95/mo, 5 TB, 2 seats included (coming soon)
Now the uncomfortable math. At 12 TB, Apple is cheaper per terabyte than we are — build 12 TB on Beebeeb from the per-TB rate and you land well above €59.99. We won't pretend otherwise. What you buy for the difference is two things the ceiling can't give you. Capacity that keeps going. And zero-knowledge encryption on every tier, no exceptions: files are encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM before they reach our servers in Falkenstein, Germany. We hold ciphertext. We can't read your library, and we can't be compelled to hand over what we never had.
Who should switch — and who shouldn't
Under 6 TB, happy inside Apple's ecosystem, fine with your provider being technically able to read your data? iCloud at €9.99 or €29.99 is a good deal and we'd be lying to say otherwise. Stay.
The move makes sense when one of these is true:
- You've hit, or you will hit, 12 TB. The clean case. Apple has nothing above it; we go to 99 TB self-serve and quote beyond.
- You want the provider structurally unable to read your files — zero-knowledge by default, not an Advanced Data Protection toggle you have to remember to flip.
- You want your data under EU jurisdiction, operated by an EU company (Initlabs B.V., Netherlands) and stored in Germany — not a US provider's EU region.
What's ready today, stated plainly
Here's where honesty cuts against the pitch. The one feature that makes leaving iCloud painless — one-click import from another cloud — is coming soon, not live. Native mobile and desktop apps are coming soon too. Today you get the web app, a CLI with WebDAV, encrypted sharing with expiry and revocation, file versioning with configurable retention, file requests, TOTP 2FA, passkeys, and OPAQUE login. If your workflow is photos-from-an-iPhone-automatically, the seamless version of that isn't shipped, and you should know that before you move 12 TB.
If you're capacity-bound and that tradeoff is acceptable, the pricing page shows what every terabyte costs, no asterisks. That's a cheaper test than hitting Apple's wall and finding out there's no button on the other side.