An iCloud Storage Alternative That Doesn't Bill You Monthly
PhotoDump Export App moves your library to a drive you own once. Stop renting space for photos you already have.
What iCloud+ actually costs
Apple's free tier is 5GB — a few dozen photos. Past that, 2TB runs $9.99 a month, 6TB is $29.99, and 12TB is $59.99. None of these have an annual discount, so a 2TB plan adds up to roughly $120 a year, every year, indefinitely. Miss a payment or let a card expire, and Apple restricts access to whatever doesn't fit in the free tier until you pay again.
You're not paying to own anything. You're paying rent on space for files you already have.
The alternative: buy the storage once
An external SSD is a one-time purchase. A 2TB drive costs roughly what two or three months of iCloud+ would. PhotoDump copies your photos and videos onto it directly from your iPhone — including anything still sitting in iCloud — and once a file is on the drive, it doesn't need to stay in iCloud to remain accessible through PhotoDump's own browsing and search.
From there, downgrading or cancelling iCloud+ is safe: the drive is already the real copy, not iCloud.
What if I don't want a physical drive?
PhotoDump also supports S3-compatible storage and REST servers (Beta) — your own bucket, your own NAS, your own infrastructure, instead of Apple's. Either way, PhotoDump itself never holds a copy of anything; files go straight from your phone to whatever destination you set up.
Related
How the transfer actually works, including moving libraries larger than your phone's own storage · Dealing with "iPhone storage full" right now