Last week, Amazon updated its cloud drive offering in a move that could end up causing a pricing war in cloud based file storage.
Their “new” Cloud model has 2 flavors and both come with a 3-month free trial.
1: Unlimited Photo storage PLUS 5GB for videos and files for $11.99 per year
2: Unlimited “Everything” for storing well, everything… photos, videos, files and documents for just $59.99 per year.
You may recall that last year Amazon tweaked their Prime membership by adding a 5GB storage perk for Prime members at no cost.
Amazons new storage plans address the typical consumer challenge of having a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays and everyday moments stored across multiple devices and having no idea of how many gigabytes of information they need to protect and safely back up.
Amazon’s bargain basement prices will certainly put pressure on Dropbox, Google and Microsoft. A quick comparison shows a gigantic gap between Amazon’s new pricing plans and those of its primary competitors. Here’s how they break down:
- Google charges $9.99/month for 1 TB. Storing 30 TB costs $299.99/month. However, Google Drive users get 15 GB for free. An incremental storage plan offers 100 GB of storage for $1.99/month.
- Dropbox charges $10 for 1 TB/month; users can get 2 GB for free.
- Microsoft charges $6.99/month for 1 TB, with 15 GB available for free. A super saver plan, of sorts, is available on Microsoft’s OneDrive. If you subscribe to Office 365, you can get unlimited cloud storage for $7/month.
The unlimited pricing plans replace the Amazon’s previous pricing menu for Amazon Cloud Storage, which gave subscribers 5 GB of storage for free. Users could add more storage, based on a tiered pricing structure starting at 20 GB for $10/year, up to 1 TB/year for $500. Certainly a substantial shift in pricing.
Finally, Amazon’s Cloud Drive has a cool feature called Auto-Save available in the free mobile app – turn it on and your photos will be automatically saved in your cloud drive – safe and sound even if your phone or tablet is lost or damaged.
With the “Storage Wars” renewed, we can expect additional innovations and price cuts from all the major contenders.
Amazon Cloud Drive:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive
