iCloud storage jumps from 200GB to 2TB with nothing in between. HEVCut and Apple's own settings are the ways round itiCloud storage jumps from 200GB to 2TB with nothing in between. HEVCut and Apple's own settings are the ways round it

Apple's iCloud+ storage plans go from 200GB straight to 2TB, and an indie iPhone app called HEVCut is pitching compression as the way to avoid the jump.

Apple's own pricing page lists five paid tiers in the United States, on top of the 5GB every account gets free. All of them can be shared with up to five family members.

The step from 200GB to 2TB is a tenfold increase in space for a little over three times the price. That is good value per gigabyte and poor value for a family whose library has just passed 200GB and will not reach 2TB for years.

What HEVCut does

HEVCut, by developer Alejandro Pacheco, was featured in 9to5Mac's Indie App Spotlight on 3 October, the day version 10.0 reached the App Store with a Liquid Glass redesign. Its listing says it re-encodes videos in HEVC, also called H.265, and photos in HEIC or AVIF, and claims video files shrink by 50 to 80 per cent. 9to5Mac says the work happens on the device. It also finds duplicates, trims burst sequences to one shot and can turn Live Photos into stills.

The app is free with limits. 9to5Mac gives the Pro unlock as 24.99 dollars a year or 39.99 dollars once, with a one-week trial for 49 cents. It requires iOS 26 or later, according to the App Store.

How can you save iCloud space without paying for 2TB?

• Delete what you do not need. Photos already gathers exact and near duplicates into a Duplicates album under Utilities, at no cost.
• Check the capture format. Settings, Camera, Formats, High Efficiency stores new photos and videos in HEIF and HEVC rather than JPEG and H.264.
• Watch the big formats. ProRAW photos and ProRes video are many times larger than standard captures and are the quickest way to fill a plan.
• Compress what is left, with an app such as HEVCut, accepting the trade-offs below.

Optimize iPhone Storage, the setting most people reach for first, does not help here. It keeps smaller copies on the phone while the full-size originals stay in iCloud, so it frees space on the device and none in the cloud.

Our take

Compression is a real answer to a real gap, but it is a one-way door. Re-encoding a video in HEVC is lossy: it throws away information to save space, and once the original has left Recently Deleted after 30 days, there is no getting it back. The claim of little visible loss may well hold on a phone screen. It is a different question on a 4K television in ten years, or for footage you might want to edit later. Neither 9to5Mac nor the App Store listing says whether HEVCut keeps capture dates, locations and edit history intact through the process, and that is what we would want to know before letting it touch a library.

The arithmetic is also closer than it looks. Moving from 200GB to 2TB costs seven dollars a month more, or 84 dollars a year. HEVCut's lifetime unlock is 39.99 dollars, which pays for itself in under six months if it keeps you on the smaller plan. But libraries grow, and the photos the newest iPhones take are larger every year. Compression delays the upgrade; it rarely cancels it.

There is a pattern here worth naming. Apple's storage pricing on its hardware is where its margins live, from the 256GB Mac mini whose SSD only one reviewer tested and found half as fast to the iCloud tiers. The 200GB to 2TB gap is the cloud version of the same design: it leaves a customer either cramped or paying for far more than they need. A 500GB or 1TB tier would remove HEVCut's main selling point overnight, and APPDOOK would expect Apple to add one long before it adds anything to Photos that compresses originals for you.

One open question cuts the other way. iOS 27 made Shared Albums keep photos at full resolution for the first time. Shared Albums have historically not counted against the owner's iCloud storage, and Apple has not said whether full-resolution copies change that. If they do, more families will meet the 200GB ceiling sooner.