MEGA

MEGA is encrypted cloud storage used for storing, syncing and sharing files, with end-to-end encryption switched on by default so only you can read what you upload. It's best known for handing out the biggest genuinely free allowance in the field, which makes it a popular first cloud account. Built-in encrypted chat and generous large-file transfer links also make it a favourite for sending big files privately, without dropping them onto a service that can scan them.

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Yes — today's MEGA is a legitimate New Zealand company (Mega Limited, headquartered in Auckland) with zero-knowledge end-to-end encryption, so it cannot read your files. Its controversial founder, Kim Dotcom, has had no role or ownership since 2015, and the company has run under professional management ever since. New Zealand privacy law applies. As with any zero-knowledge service, the responsibility shifts to you: guard your password and recovery key carefully, because MEGA genuinely can't reset what it can't read. On that understanding, it's trustworthy and widely used.

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MEGA's free tier is the headline — the biggest genuine free storage in this comparison — and it's enough for many people on its own. Paid Pro plans start from €8.33/mo, billed annually, and scale up to multi-terabyte tiers. Where MEGA really competes is the per-gigabyte price of those larger plans, which is among the cheapest encrypted storage you can buy. So the honest advice is: start free, and only move to a paid tier when you actually outgrow it — at which point the big tiers give you a lot of encrypted space for the money.

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Mega Limited, a privately held company headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand, founded in 2013. Its original founder, Kim Dotcom, departed in 2015 and has publicly distanced himself from it since; the company has operated independently under professional management for a decade. New Zealand privacy law governs it. So while the name still carries some of its early-2010s notoriety, the business behind it today is a conventional, independently run storage provider.

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Yes — encryption happens on your device before anything is uploaded, and only your password-derived keys can decrypt the files, so MEGA's system is designed such that the company itself cannot read your data. Its client code is publicly available for review, which lets researchers verify the claims. The flip side is the one every zero-knowledge service shares: if you lose both your password and your recovery key, your files are unrecoverable by design — there's no support team that can let you back in.

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A few. Free-tier transfer quotas can throttle heavy downloading, so power users may hit limits. Desktop sync is solid but a little less polished than pCloud's, and there's no integrated document editing for real-time collaboration. A reputational quirk lingers too: some people still associate the brand with its pre-2015 founder era, even though the current company is unrelated in practice. And, like most providers here, there's no Canadian data region. For free encrypted gigabytes and cheap large tiers, though, little else competes.

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