Dropbox challenger pCloud just become profitable – TechCrunch



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Between Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and iCloud Drive, consumer cloud storage is a saturated space. And yet, a small Swiss company called pCloud has managed to attract more than 9 million users in the last five years. The company recently achieved profitability with a team of 32 people.

If you know Dropbox, pCloud will not surprise you. The service allows you to back up and synchronize files on your devices. You get 10GB for free and you can pay for more storage and features.

Unlike Dropbox or OneDrive, pCloud behaves more like an external hard drive. When you install the application on your computer, everything stays in the default cloud. On macOS, the company uses Fuse to create a new virtual hard disk in the Finder.

If you right-click a folder, you can choose to download it to your computer for offline access. It creates a new folder on your local hard drive that stays in sync with your pCloud account. Similarly, you can add existing folders to pCloud from the control panel. These folders will remain permanently synchronized as long as the application remains active on your computer.

pCloud also supports LAN syncing, which means that if you have multiple devices on the same Wi-Fi network, they will transfer files over your local network instead of the Internet. Dropbox also has this feature.

On mobile, you can access your files using the mobile application. Like many competitors, pCloud also allows you to automatically save your film to your pCloud account.

Now let's talk about security. Like other cloud storage services, pCloud does not encrypt your files by default – pCloud uses file encryption while it is being transferred. When you synchronize a file with the help of pCloud, the company can theoretically extract that file. If you really care about privacy, you should not use cloud storage services

But pCloud also offers an optional add-on called pCloud Crypto. This feature allows you to create a secret folder that you can unlock with a password. When you add a file to this folder, it is encrypted on your device and sent to the pCloud server. If you do not have this password, you can not unlock the file. This means that pCloud and the authorities can not recover these files without you.

PCloud costs $ 3.99 per month for 500 GB of storage and $ 7.99 per month for 2 TB of storage. pCloud Crypto costs an additional $ 4.99 per month. You can also buy lifetime subscriptions for $ 175 for 500 GB, $ 350 for 2 TB and $ 125 for Crypto. It's expensive, but it might convince some users who are not subscribers.

Even though competition with Microsoft, Google, Apple and Dropbox seems incredibly complicated, I'm happy to see that it's still possible to create an alternative product with differentiating features. pCloud will probably never be as big as Dropbox, but it's an interesting business to follow.

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