Amazon Offers ‘Unlimited’ Consumer Cloud Storage For £55 A Year

Amazon is offering unlimited cloud storage to consumers for £5 a month as it seeks to take on Dropbox, Google, Microsoft and others.

Subscribers to Amazon Prime already get 5GB of free space on Amazon Drive, but for a £55 a year, anyone can store their files and access them on any device.

Photos and videos can be auto-uploaded from mobile devices and media can be viewed in full resolution from “almost any device.”

Amazon Drive storage

“Most people have a lifetime of photos from birthdays, holidays and everyday moments stored across numerous devices—and a lot of those people don’t know how many gigabytes they need to back all those memories up, or what it’s going to cost,” said David Nenke, Director of Amazon Drive.

“With our new Unlimited Storage plan, that’s no longer something customers need to worry about. They now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music, and other files in one place—with no tiered storage options or rising fees to worry about.”

The offer is clearly aimed at consumers but many cloud firms use the offer of free or discounted storage as a way of penetrating the enterprise via the back door. Box offers free storage in the hope that employees will become accustomed to the service and encourage IT managers to agree a business subscription because workers will be more likely to use the platform in the office.

The tactic is also employed by Dropbox, which after years of courting personal users, is targeting the business sector in a big way with Dropbox for Business. Microsoft and Google also hope to lock-in more users into their service ecosystems.

This battle has claimed a number of victims, including Canonical, which shut down its rival Ubuntu One in 2014 claiming the free storage wars were simply not sustainable.

Quiz: What do you know about the cloud in 2016?