LogMeIn has announced pricing options for its upcoming Dropbox competitor, Cubby, which is currently in beta and due to launch sometime in early 2013. Introduced in April, beta users have been granted up to 5GB of free cloud storage with the potential to earn another gigabyte for each referral made – a substantial boost over the 2GB of free space and 500MB per referral currently offered by Dropbox.
LogMeIn has confirmed that this tier – now called "Cubby Basic" – will exist when the service goes live. If you need more space than the freebie option offers, the company has announced a paid tier called "Cubby Pro," which will start at $6.99 a month for 100GB of online storage. To get that price, however, you'll have to pay for the full year upfront ($83.88). Monthly rates will be set at $9.99 ($119.88 a year).
Those prices are already competitive with Dropbox's 100GB service, which also goes for $9.99 a month or $99.00 for a full year, but LogMeIn is running a beta sale that cuts 40% off Cubby Pro. With that discount, you're looking at only $47.88 ($3.99 a month) when paying for a year of 100GB of space, $95.76 ($7.98 a month) for 200GB and so on up to 1TB, which costs $478.80 a year ($39.90 a month).
Cubby Pro has several extras not present on Basic accounts, including a feature known as "Cubby Locks" that provides user-held encryption keys, unified account management and billing, access to level 2 support, as well as "DirectSync," which lets you sync an unlimited amount of data across devices without using cloud storage. The service has native clients for Windows, Mac OS X, iOS and Android.