Home / Blog / How to back up photos without paying monthly fee

How to back up your Android photos without paying a monthly fee

Updated May 2026 · 6 min read

Why most photo backup services charge a monthly fee

When you use Google Photos, iCloud, or Dropbox, you are paying a company to manage storage infrastructure on your behalf. They buy or lease servers, build and operate data centres, and then rent you a slice of that capacity at a marked-up monthly rate. It is a convenient model, but the economics work in their favour, not yours.

Google One charges $1.99/month for 100 GB and $2.99/month for 200 GB. iCloud+ charges $0.99/month for 50 GB and $2.99/month for 200 GB. Dropbox bundles storage with collaboration features you may not need and charges $9.99–$16.58/month even for its cheapest paid tier. None of these are unreasonable prices, but they are all subscription fees — recurring monthly costs that compound indefinitely as long as you use the service.

The deeper problem is lock-in. Your photos live in the service's proprietary environment. If the company raises prices, changes terms, or shuts down, migrating thousands of photos is a painful manual process. And because you do not own the storage, you are always one policy change away from losing access.

How to avoid the subscription: bring your own bucket

The alternative is a "bring your own bucket" (BYOB) model. Instead of paying an app company to manage storage, you create a cloud storage bucket directly with a commodity storage provider — Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, or Amazon S3 — and give an app like Breazzy the credentials to upload to it.

You pay the storage provider directly at raw commodity rates, with no markup and no middleman. Breazzy itself is free and earns no money from your storage. It simply acts as the bridge between your Android camera roll and your bucket.

The bucket is yours. You can browse its contents with any S3-compatible tool, download everything at any time, or switch apps in the future without losing a single photo. There is no proprietary container, no export step, and no vendor that can hold your photos hostage.

This model is not new — developers have used cloud object storage this way for years — but Breazzy makes it accessible to anyone with an Android phone, no technical background required.

Step-by-step: free photo backup with no monthly fee

Getting started with Breazzy and Backblaze B2 takes about 10 minutes. Here is the complete process:

1. Create a free Backblaze account. Go to backblaze.com and sign up. No credit card is required to use the free 10 GB storage tier.
2. Create a private B2 bucket. In the B2 Cloud Storage section of your Backblaze dashboard, click "Create a Bucket." Give it a name like my-android-photos and set it to private.
3. Generate an application key. In your Backblaze account, go to App Keys and create a new key scoped to your bucket with read and write permissions. Copy the key ID and application key — you will need both in Breazzy.
4. Install Breazzy and connect. Download Breazzy from the Google Play Store, open it, and enter your bucket name, key ID, and application key on the setup screen. Breazzy will verify the connection immediately. Once connected, choose which folders to back up and tap Start backup.

For screenshots of every step, see the complete Backblaze B2 setup guide.

The first backup uploads your entire existing library. Subsequent backups are incremental — only new or changed photos are uploaded. Breazzy runs in the background on Android and backs up automatically when your phone is connected to Wi-Fi (or mobile data, if you allow it).

What does it actually cost?

With Backblaze B2, storage costs $0.006 per GB per month. The first 10 GB is always free. There is no minimum commitment and you are billed only for what you actually store. Downloads through Cloudflare's network are free.

• 10 GB library: $0.00/month (within the free tier)
• 100 GB library: ~$0.60/month
• 500 GB library: ~$3.00/month
• 1 TB library: ~$6.00/month

Compare that to Google One: $1.99/month for 100 GB, $2.99/month for 200 GB, and $9.99/month for 2 TB. At 100 GB, Breazzy + B2 costs 70% less. At 1 TB, it costs 40% less — and the gap widens as Google does not offer a 500 GB plan, forcing you into the 2 TB tier at $9.99/month.

For a full comparison across all supported providers including Cloudflare R2 and Amazon S3, see the pricing page.

What about other no-subscription options?

There are a few other ways to avoid a monthly subscription, each with trade-offs worth understanding.

USB backup to a PC or external drive is completely free, but it is not offsite storage. If your home is damaged by fire, flood, or theft, both your phone and the backup are lost at the same time. Offsite cloud storage solves this — the whole point of a backup is that it survives whatever happens to your primary device.

Immich is an open-source, self-hosted photo backup solution similar in spirit to Google Photos. It is free to run, but you need your own server — a home NAS, a Raspberry Pi, or a rented VPS. Setting up and maintaining Immich takes meaningful technical knowledge, and the server itself has ongoing hardware or hosting costs.

rclone is a powerful open-source command-line tool that can sync files to virtually any cloud storage provider. It works, but it is not an Android app — it requires a computer and comfort with the terminal. Not an option for most people who just want their photos backed up automatically.

Breazzy occupies the space between these extremes: it is as easy to set up as Google Photos, it gives you offsite cloud storage like Google Photos, but it routes your photos to a bucket you own rather than a service you rent. For most Android users who want no subscription and no technical complexity, it is the most practical option available.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a photo backup with no monthly fee?

Yes. Breazzy is a free Android app with no subscription fee of any kind. You connect it to a cloud storage bucket you own — such as Backblaze B2 — and pay that provider directly at commodity rates. If your photo library is under 10 GB (roughly 1000–3000 typical smartphone photos), your total cost is $0 per month.

How much does Backblaze B2 cost for photos?

Backblaze B2 charges $0.006 per GB per month. The first 10 GB of storage is always free. For a 100 GB library, you pay about $0.60/month; for a 500 GB library, about $3/month; for a 1 TB library, about $6/month. There are no setup fees, no minimum commitments, and no charges for downloading your photos through Cloudflare's network.

Can I back up 1000 photos for free?

Very likely yes. A typical smartphone photo taken at 12–24 megapixels (JPEG or HEIC) is roughly 3–8 MB. One thousand photos would occupy about 3–8 GB — well within Backblaze B2's free 10 GB storage tier. You could back up around 1000–3000 average-size photos at zero cost per month, indefinitely.