Competition in the crowded cloud storage market has just got a bit more intense after Amazon announced two unlimited storage plans.
The online giant has revealed some major new expansions for Amazon Cloud Drive, its cloud storage service aimed at the consumer market.
For the cost of $11.99 (£8.04) per year, users can upload as many photos as they want to the Cloud Drive. This plan also includes 5 GB of additional storage for videos or other documents and files. This plan is very cheap indeed, as it works out at just £1.50 per month.
The second unlimited plan is called the “Unlimited Everything Plan” and is a little more expensive. For the cost of $59.99 per year, or £40.26 in real money, users can store an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music in Cloud Drive. This plan is also very cheap as it works out at just £3.35 per month.
“Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices,” said Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive. “And, they don’t know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up.”
“With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don’t need to worry about storage space – they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music, and files in one convenient place,” said Petersen.
And to make the above plans even more attractive to cloud storage punters, both plans come with a free three month trial.
Existing users can also change to the new plans by simply logging into their Cloud Drive accounts. Of course, the free unlimited photo storage is already available to Amazon Prime customers or those people using a Kindle Fire device.
Amazon is of course a major player in the enterprise cloud storage environment. For consumers, it launched its Cloud Drive in the UK back in August 2012, that gave users 5GB of free storage provided on sign-up.
However it struggled to stand out against a host of rival cloud storage providers such as Dropbox, Box, Microsoft OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive), and of course Google Drive.
The cloud storage environment is incredibly competitive, and it surely cannot be long before these rivals start to offer their own low cost, unlimited storage options. It is worth noting that Dropbox, Microsoft, and Google already offer unlimited storage options, but it is only for enterprise customers, and not consumers. That said, Microsoft does offer a large cloud storage option for people with an Office 365 subscription.
Until now, if a consumer wanted a large slice of cloud storage, Dropbox would charge them $99 (£66.41) per year for 1TB. Google likewise would charge $99 per year, but Microsoft was perhaps until now the most competitive, as an Office 365 subscription costing $84 (£56.37) per year that came with 1TB of storage.
Amazon’s Unlimited Everything plan at $59.99 (£40.26) however, is now by far the cheapest option for the most space.
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You're writing this article from the perspective of a UK consumer, however Amazon do not sell the unlimited plans to UK residents. Hence the price is only advertised in USD $ on Amazon's site.
Your article is misleading.