The short answer: as of October 2026, four providers sell pay-once cloud storage — pCloud, Internxt, Icedrive and Koofr — plus ShieldFive's Lifetime Vault (2 TB for €199 once). Filen no longer sells lifetime plans. The plans differ less on price than on two things that are easy to miss: whether your files are encrypted on your device by default, and what "lifetime" means in the terms.
Who still sells lifetime cloud storage
| Provider | Lifetime plan on sale | Files encrypted on your device by default | What "lifetime" means |
|---|---|---|---|
| ShieldFive | Yes — 2 TB, €199 once, 30-day refund | Yes, every file and filename, on every plan | 99 years or until ShieldFive stops operating the service; non-transferable |
| pCloud | Yes — several tiers, from 500 GB | No — zero-knowledge encryption is a separate paid purchase for one folder | Lifetime of the account owner or 99 years, whichever is shorter; non-transferable |
| Internxt | Yes — 1 TB to 5 TB, usually sold at a large discount | Yes | Not defined in the terms we could find |
| Icedrive | Yes — several tiers, extra plans can be stacked | Partly — check which folders are encrypted on your device | Not defined in the terms we could find; Icedrive withdrew lifetime plans once before bringing them back |
| Koofr | Yes | Check Koofr's documentation | Check Koofr's terms |
| Filen | No — Pro ended November 2025, Starter paused January 2026 | Yes (existing plans) | Existing plans run "as long as the service is online" |
| Proton Drive, MEGA, Sync.com, Tresorit, NordLocker | No — subscriptions only | Yes | — |
Checked against each provider's own pages and terms on 5 October 2026. Lifetime prices change often and most are sold at rotating discounts, so we don't quote competitors' prices here — check the current price on their page before you compare.
If you were looking for a Filen lifetime plan
Filen sold its Pro lifetime plans for the last time on Black Friday 2025; they sold out by early December and Filen has said they will not come back. It paused the Starter lifetime plan on 3 January 2026, with no return date. Existing Filen lifetime plans keep working.
If what you wanted from Filen was end-to-end encryption by default and a single payment, the remaining options are Internxt and ShieldFive. pCloud and Icedrive sell lifetime plans too, but on pCloud the default storage is not end-to-end encrypted.
The two questions that matter more than the price
1. Who can read the files? "Encrypted" usually means the provider encrypts your files on its servers with keys it holds. That protects against a stolen disk, not against the provider, a breach of the provider, or a legal demand. End-to-end (zero-knowledge) encryption means the file is encrypted on your device and the provider stores only ciphertext. On a lifetime plan this matters more, because you are committing for decades to whatever the default is.
2. What happens if the company stops? A lifetime plan is a bet that the provider stays in business and keeps honouring old plans. Every plan on this page is tied to the life of the service in one way or another. Prefer providers with a clear export path, keep a local copy of anything you can't lose, and read the terms on termination before you pay.
ShieldFive's Lifetime Vault: what you get, and its limits
The Lifetime Vault is 2 TB for €199, paid once, with a 30-day full refund. Every file and filename is encrypted in your browser before upload — web uploads default to ML-KEM-1024 with XChaCha20-Poly1305 — and we store only ciphertext and never hold your keys. You can preview PDFs, images, spreadsheets and Word documents in the browser without downloading them. There is also a free 5 GB plan, so you can try it with files you can afford to lose first.
The limits, stated plainly: there is no desktop sync client and no iOS app yet, and the Android app is in Google Play testing; the crypto core is open source (Apache-2.0) but the apps are not, and no external security audit has been completed. We serve the web app's code, so the guarantee holds for the code you are served, and file sizes and timestamps are not encrypted. It is a limited release, and a younger company than pCloud, which has sold lifetime plans since 2013.
Which one fits you
pCloud fits if you want the longest track record and polished sync apps, and you are willing to pay extra for its encryption add-on for the files that need it.
Internxt fits if you want end-to-end encryption by default and more than 2 TB on a single payment, bought during one of its frequent sales.
ShieldFive fits if you want every file encrypted on your device by default, 2 TB is enough, and you can work through the web or Android today. Read the security model first.
Try it
The free plan is 5 GB with no card. Upload a few test files, preview one, share one with an expiry, revoke it, and check recovery before you buy anything, from us or anyone else.
This comparison reflects each provider's public pages and terms as of 5 October 2026 and will be updated as the plans change.