Online storage is an ever-expanding place as everyone tries to offer more and more space. Amazon has decided to bypass the storage space wars by announcing two unlimited storage plans for it’s cloud based storage service – Amazon Cloud Drive.
The plans focus on two specific scenarios. For those who have loads of photos, there is the Unlimited Photos plan that costs $11.99 per year. Then there’s the Unlimited Everything plan that, well, does what its name suggests, and costs $59.99 per year. There’s also a free three-month trial available to see how much “unlimited” space you actually need and for what. At any rate, with a monthly cost of $5, it’s almost worthwhile paying for the service irrespective of how much cloud-based storage you actually need.
Before today, Amazon Cloud Storage offered 5GB of storage for free, with a tiered pricing structure thereafter. This ran from 20GB for $10/year all the way up to 1TB/year for $500. So not only does this news today effectively scythe its top-tier offering by 10-fold, but it ups the top-level storage from 1,000GB to unlimited.
For those who were on the free 5GB plan before, it’s not clear whether Amazon will allow users to remain on that plan, or will be upgraded to the $11.99 tier. But the company does say “Existing Cloud Drive customers can change their plans now by simply logging into their Cloud Drive accounts,” which definitely suggests old plans are being made obsolete, though no timescale is given for this.
As part of the Unlimited Photo plan, it’s worth noting that users also get 5GB of additional space to store non-image files, including videos. This is already the case for Amazon’s “Prime” subscribers, and those who own an Amazon Fire device.