The ongoing cloud storage war has intensified with Amazon.com Inc AMZN rolling out two new unlimited storage plans for clients to save their media content on Amazon Cloud Drive. (psst, this offer is valid for non-prime members also!)
The $11.99/year photos plan allows for the storage of unlimited photos and 5 GB of videos, documents and other files. The $59.99/year everything plan allows for unlimited storage of photos, videos, files, documents, movies and music (in short, everything).
How Does It Heat Up the Cloud Storage War?
There are two main reasons as to why Amazon’s competitors must take notice of its latest move.
Firstly, Amazon’s pricing is very competitive- in fact we might just say its plans are ridiculously cheap.
Now, getting 1TB (versus Amazon’s unlimited TB’s) of space with Dropbox or Google GOOGL costs $120 per year ($10/ month). Google charges a whopping $300 each month for 30TB storage.
Apple AAPL iCloud service charges $240/year for 1TB of storage.
Flickr, which is owned by Yahoo YHOO, gives 1TB of free photo storage. The catch here? These are sponsored by ads. The ad-free version comes at a price tag of $50 per year.
Now you know why we called Amazon’s UNLIMITED offer “ridiculously” cheap.
Moving on to our second reason, Amazon just might be the first to market unlimited storage as a service to anyone who wants it.
Dropbox offers unlimited storage as part of Dropbox for Business while Google gives unlimited options with its enterprise version, Drive for Work.
Amazon might have done this to target an average consumer who has large amounts of digital media, across a range of devices.
For Now
Oh! And yes, you can try Amazon’s new plans (both of them) for three months free of cost before making the investment.
For Prime members and Fire device owners, the unlimited photo option is still free, but they have to shell out money for the Unlimited Everything Plan for other kinds of media.
Amazon has definitely taken the competition a notch higher with its latest plans. Cloud storage prices have decreased considerably over the past few years and it’s not clear today how much further they will drop.
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