You're going to have a hard time beating $2/mo unless you roll it into something else like blackblaze ($100/year for unlimited storage), Microsoft office 365 ($100/year with 1 TB of OneDrive), etc. If your space is going to photos, the speed and responsiveness of Google photos far outpaces some of the alternatives (cough cough OneDrive).

Self hosting is a viable alternative if you're interested in having more control/local storage or if you are interested in this kind of thing and want to do it/dabble in it as a hobby.

I personally built a NAS, which will take far too long to amortize vs just paying $2/mo. I chose this route because I value a local backup and because a NAS can a bit of a lifestyle product. "It can double as a server!". Sounds fun, but I would want to build the thing I host which will also take time so... You could potentially build a NAS that will average out to $2 or less a month if you have spare parts or score some used parts cheap. Odds are that route could also be used for self hosting.

Microslop OneDrive wants $20/m for 1T. However you slice it, we pay for them to back stuff up on a cloud that we used to just back up on our own physical storage. This also gives them access to all our info/pics etc to scan for their AI bots.