The problem for me is that if I am just using it to archive or back up my photos then they are asking for more money per year than it would cost me to simply bu

The problem for me is that if I am just using it to archive or back up my photos then they are asking for more money per year than it would cost me to simply buy more local disk space and make a local backup. Most of the photos I have (had) there are private so they incur essentially zero bandwidth charges. It seems to me that such a system should benefit from economies of scale so that a year's subscription should at least be cheaper than buying local storage. So it's back to Google Photos for unlimited storage of reduced resolution copies and 15 GB of general storage (enough for over twenty thousand full resolution pictures from my Moto G5+).