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Amazon Cloud Drive Finally Has Enough Space for Your Porn Collection

amazon_cloud_drive[1]Every major tech company offers a cloud storage solution, but in spite of the fierce competition most of the services only offer a limited amount of storage before requiring you to pay.

Amazon announced on Thursday that they are launching an unlimited tier for their online storage service. Now users can pay $12 a year to get unlimited storage for their photos, or pay $60 a year for a truly unlimited plan:

  • Unlimited Photos Plan (free 3-month trial, then $11.99 per year—equivalent of less than $1 per month): Store an infinite number of photos inCloud Drive without worrying about taking up space on phones, cameras, or other devices. Customers can upload existing collections and store all future photos taken. This plan also includes 5 GB of additional storage for videos or other documents and files.
  • Unlimited Everything Plan (free 3-month trial, then $59.99 per year—equivalent of less than $5 per month): Store an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music in Cloud Drive.

In comparison, Google offers a $2 a month plan for 100GB of storage (first 15GB free). Microsoft matches Google’s terms with OneDrive, but Dropbox offers only a free 2GB plus a $19 a month plan for 1TB of storage (there’s also a business tier).

Amazon’s move is clearly an attempt to compete against the likes of Dropbox, Google, Microsoft in the crowded online storage market. Amazon isn’t the first to offer an unlimited plan, although they do now have the broadest offering; Google offers one for certain verticals, while Dropbox sells one to business customers and Microsoft offers unlimited storage to Office 365 subscribers. Amazon also offers free unlimited photo storage for Prime members.

I think Amazon is trying to tap into a common desire to save everything, no matter how old or how much space that takes.

I for one try to save all my files, and what with hard drives being so cheap I’ve never actually run out of local storage. But if you’ve been struggling with managing files spread across multiple devices or paying fees for cloud storage then this could be good news for you.

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Comments


Common Sense March 26, 2015 um 12:49 pm

A couple of points… Amazon offers unlimited storage if you have Prime.

Shutterfly has always offered unlimited storage of photos for free, plus lots of great ways to share with friends and family, including as made web sites as you want or need. I create a new website each year and I’ve also used it to share with groups like my kids' sport teams in the past.

Nate Hoffelder March 26, 2015 um 12:55 pm

Unlimited storage for photos, yes. Someone pointed out that omission on Twitter, and I fixed the post.


Doug March 26, 2015 um 3:47 pm

It’s not just about "running out of local storage". Cloud storage provides easy off-site backup in case your home burns down or something. It also provides a simple way to both store and share your photos. And for mobile photography, it can provide instant backup and sharing while taking pictures in the field. As you noted, there are a lot of options for that. (Myself, I used Trunx for a while, but switched to OneDrive.)

The restriction to just photos makes storage demands lower, because it takes an awful lot of photos to fill up a GB. I think a lot of mobile users are looking for low-cost video backup and sharing, and that $60/year offer from Amazon might just fill the bill for them. For now, until the other sites jump in.


Paul March 26, 2015 um 3:50 pm

It sort of explains why the owners of PictureLife sold out to Streamnation. My current plan with them is $150 per year.

https://picturelife.com/about

It will be hard for them to compete against $12 per year, even with the extra security and widgets.

Nate Hoffelder March 26, 2015 um 4:00 pm

Damn that’s expensive.

Paul March 26, 2015 um 4:17 pm

Yes, but as its seamless (i.e. its all automatic), I can keep using my standard photo programs as it syncs well with them, and it has version control among others, it was worth it.

Once the new Photos program comes out and all the bugs are fixed I’ll probably switch over to using that for storage instead.

Paul March 26, 2015 um 4:18 pm

Its also roughly the cost you would pay for the equivalent storage with Apple.


cv b v March 26, 2015 um 9:05 pm

I don’t understand such offerings. Unless one is comfortable with sharing one’s documents with the NSA plus whatever commercial entity offers the respective service, such services cannot be used without encoding one’s files in a format unreadable to the service provider prior to uploading them. And that completely renders that distinction between "photos" and "other files" completely useless. And I wonder, whether the contract is actually explicitly about "photos" for the cheaper plan, for if it were about any image file format, then any content could be pretty efficiently encoded as an image. There would be no point then to offer different rates, since any rational person would take the cheaper one and adapt her encoding to the file format included with that plan. Most likely though, as careless as it sounds, some people might actually upload personal content to some of these clouds, either being aware of but having decided to ignore the implications or not realizing what they’re doing.


Maria (BearMountainBooks) March 27, 2015 um 9:48 am

The change for me is that there is no free space/deal. It’s pay or go away. I used Amazon’s cloud to read samples without having to download to my device. I tried freebies that way too. It’s not a big deal; I keep all my stuff local (cheap hard drives as you said) although offsite storage is a pain because we do it the old fashioned way of doing a backup and taking that backup offsite.

I didn’t have any expectations for free to stick around, but I did find myself using it, much to my surprise. Read in the cloud was one option when I grabbed a freebie or sample and it was much easier to just read it right there online and decide if I wanted it. I won’t lose anything either way–they allow me to access anything that was already up there (nothing of use in my case). But if I want to put anything new up there it forces me into a paid plan.

I can easily live without it. It’s not even worth 12 dollars a year for me.


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mike me June 30, 2020 um 8:10 pm

You grossly under estimate the size of the average porn collection.

Nate Hoffelder July 1, 2020 um 6:57 am

LOL, perhaps


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