If you're cynical you'd think "of course they'd offer a free version and then make you pay for it." But that's basically the cloud storage market in a nutshell. All the cloud storage providers are in a race to the bottom, and once they have your data they want to upsell you on other cloud technologies. If you just need to store data, that's actually great news, because these providers are working hard on the optimizations that make it possible to give you storage as cheap as they can.
Cheap options are Glacier at $0.004/GB, Backblaze at $0.005/GB, GCS Coldline at $0.007/GB. That's the monthly cost for bare cloud storage with no egress. Anything cheaper than about $50/year for 1TB will fall in one of two categories:
1. Subsidized by the provider, but probably not for long. This has happened so many times I can't even remember them all, Amazon is just the most recent.
2. Strictly DIY, probably with a much higher chance of data loss than you realize.
Cheap options are Glacier at $0.004/GB, Backblaze at $0.005/GB, GCS Coldline at $0.007/GB. That's the monthly cost for bare cloud storage with no egress. Anything cheaper than about $50/year for 1TB will fall in one of two categories:
1. Subsidized by the provider, but probably not for long. This has happened so many times I can't even remember them all, Amazon is just the most recent.
2. Strictly DIY, probably with a much higher chance of data loss than you realize.