Watch out Dropbox, Amazon’s coming at you with a new cloud storage plan that’s ridiculously cheap. You can now store an unlimited number of files in the cloud for $US60 a year. That’s five bucks a month for everything.
To be perfectly clear, Amazon’s Unlimited Everything Plan allows you to store “an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies and music in Cloud Drive.” Additionally, there’s a $US12 per year photos-only plan. Don’t forget, if you’re a Prime subscriber, you already get unlimited photos, but you won’t get any discounts or anything if you want to move up to the “everything” plan.
So how does this standup to the competition? Well, unlimited is a huge amount of space. Today, the going benchmark is 1TB of space, which services offer for between $US2.50 per month (MediaFire) and $US10 per month (Dropbox, OneDrive). (Check out the cloud storage comparison we did last August.)
Amazon’s offer is cheap by any standard. But it’s worth noting that unlimited storage is only potentially more space than 1TB. For all but the most intense data hoarders, 1TB is basically unlimited. For example, I have loads of photos — I shoot for work — and tons of music, and I’m still only at about 600GB.
It makes sense that Amazon, as the master of an army of cloud servers, is using that power to leverage more customers. Cloud storage is basically unlimited so why not offer everyone unlimited storage. In choosing a service, features like user interface and reliability are probably more important than sheer volume these days. [Amazon]