IDrive Pricing Guide for 2023

IDrive is one of our favorite online backup providers, and it sometimes makes our top cloud storage lists, thanks to its great syncing and sharing features. However, the IDrive pricing table is long, and we would forgive you for being confused about which is the best option. That’s why we’re going to break down the pricing plans and make them easier to understand. 

Key Takeaways:

• IDrive has three main groups of plans: Personal, Team and Business. The group of plans affects the features you get and your options for storage capacity.
• All of IDrive’s plans have a first year discount of at least 25%.
• IDrive e2 is an IaaS storage provider, which charges per gigabyte.

If you haven’t already, it’s worth checking out our full IDrive review, which will give you more information about IDrive’s features, interface, mobile apps, privacy, customer support and more. That way, you’ll know a bit more about what you’re actually getting as we jump into the numbers.

Also note that all the plans come with a discount for the first year. We’ll be focusing on the full price for the majority of the article, but we’ll talk about these discounts in more detail later on.

• Can I Pay for IDrive Monthly?

  Although some of the IDrive Business plans and IDrive e2 have a monthly option, you’ll need to get the annual subscription to get a Personal or Team plan.

• Does IDrive Have a Free Version?

  IDrive offers a 10GB free plan. It doesn’t require credit card details to sign up or have a time limit.

• Do You Pay for IDrive?

  Although there is a free plan, if you need software that can back up more than 10GB, you’ll need to pay for IDrive.

IDrive Pricing: The Different Products

IDrive has plenty of plan offerings, depending on how much space you need and how many computers you have. These plans are sorted into three groups: IDrive Personal, IDrive Team and IDrive Business.

If you prefer to use an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) cloud storage provider, then IDrive e2 might be a better choice. It’s quite different from the other IDrive plans, as it lacks a desktop app, so you should read our full IDrive e2 review if you want to learn about this IaaS provider.

IDrive Personal Pricing

The IDrive Personal plans give you access to all of IDrive’s cloud backup features — including its syncing and sharing functionality — for unlimited computers. However, you can’t separate data into different user accounts, making these plans more suited for, well, personal use.

There are two premium Personal plans, which give you 5TB and 10TB of storage for $79.50 and $99.50 per year, respectively. You can pay two years at a time, but that’s only useful for getting extra value from the first-year discount (which we’ll go through later).

If you want to try out the service before spending any money, you can use the free 30-day trial.

IDrive Team Pricing

IDrive Team plans come with all the online backup and cloud storage tools you get with IDrive Personal plans, and you get extra features like single sign-on, priority support, compliance with regulations like HIPAA and the ability to manage multiple users from one admin account.

However, while you get the ability to have multiple users and more storage space, your IDrive account will have a limited number of computers. The Team plans give you one user and one computer per Terabyte of space, with 5TB, 10TB, 25TB, 30TB, 35TB, 40TB, 45TB, 50TB and 100TB being the nine options.

Because of the ability to have multiple users and the wide range of plan sizes, this category covers: 

• Families that want to keep their data separate
• Small businesses that are just starting out
• Some larger businesses that don’t need to back up servers and don’t have a huge budget for their cloud backup space

IDrive Business Pricing

The Business plans are like the Team plans, except you can back up servers and the number of users and computers that can be attached to the account aren’t limited. This makes it great for businesses that have hundreds of people who need access to different sets of files or projects and don’t want on-site network attached storage (NAS) or an IaaS solution.

You can also pay for six of the eight Business plans on a monthly basis. You’ll miss out on the first-year discount and pay 20% more, but that may be worth it if you don’t want to pay thousands of dollars upfront.

IDrive e2 Pricing

As an IaaS provider, IDrive e2 costs $0.004 per GB per month, and you only pay for what you use. However, if you know you’re definitely going to use a set amount, you can pay for one of 10 annual plans. These will give you a full year for the price of just 10 months, and any extra storage you use is charged at the standard rate.

IDrive offers unlimited free uploads (called “ingress” in the IaaS industry) and three times your storage in free downloads (or “egress”).

You’ll need backup management software to use this storage (read our Duplicati review for a good cheap option), but it can be less expensive if you only need a small amount of storage. It’s also the only option for larger businesses that need to store more than 100TB.

IDrive First-Year Discount 

Although we’ve been looking at the base price for these plans, each annual and two-year plan comes with some kind of discount. For the Personal, Team and Business plans, you get 25% off your initial plan, either your first year or first two years. IDrive e2 currently offers a huge 90% off for new users who buy an annual plan up front.

There’s also a discount code that gets you 75% off the first year of the 5TB Personal plan. That’s around $1.66 per month, less than a third the cost of Backblaze’s cheapest plan and about the same as Google charges for just 100GB of Google Drive storage. 

IDrive Extra Services

Although features like the Android and iOS apps, external hard drive backups and zero-knowledge encryption are included as standard with every plan, there is an extra service IDrive offers — IDrive Express. 

This is IDrive’s courier service. It lets you upload and download data much faster than most internet connections allow. You can still use a private key and shipping is completely free for U.S. customers. 

An Express Backup, which lets you upload your data to your IDrive cloud storage space, costs only $59.95 per request. You also get one free Express Backup per year if you have a Personal plan, and three per year if you’re on a Team or Business plan.

If you want to restore your data from your IDrive account to your device, it’ll cost $99.50 with an Express Restore. Although you can’t get a refund like you can with Backblaze’s Restore By Mail, this price isn’t awful. The lack of a size limit is nice, but it’s disappointing that there aren’t any free courier restores. 

How Does IDrive’s Pricing Compare?

The IDrive pricing plans are a pretty good value for an online backup. For example, IDrive’s 5TB Personal plan costs $6.63 per month annually. In comparison, Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office costs $23.75 per month for 5TB of storage, and SpiderOak One Backup costs $26.67 per month for the same amount of space. 

Backup providers that offer unlimited storage space, such as Carbonite and CrashPlan, usually cost around $5 to $10 per month. This is about the same price as IDrive’s 5TB plan, except IDrive can be used across an unlimited number of computers. 

Which option is a better value comes down to whether you need mass storage or a backup for many desktop and mobile devices. 

Finally, there are other cloud storage services. Sync.com and pCloud both charge around $8 per month for 2TB of storage, and pCloud charges extra for private encryption. 

Although Sync.com’s new unlimited Teams plan and pCloud’s lifetime plans both offer something IDrive doesn’t, most people will find that the IDrive offers better value if you don’t need the best cloud storage features.

Final Thoughts 

Overall, if you want a single account that can back up your computer, laptop and mobile phone, while also offering some syncing and sharing features, then IDrive is a great solution. The 5TB Personal plan comes with almost everything the average user could want at a low cost per GB. 

There are scenarios where a service with better cloud storage features or an unlimited backup option may be a better choice. However, IDrive is our favorite online backup for several reasons, and its value is certainly one of them. 

What do you think of IDrive’s pricing structure? Have you used any of the plans? Is there another service that you think is a better value? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks for reading.