News

Amazon Cuts Cloud Storage Prices to Nearly Nothing

The cloud giant undercuts the competition in the "how low can you go?" contest.

• By Keith Ward
• 03/31/2015

The next salvo in the cloud price wars has been fired, as Amazon.com Inc. has introduced unlimited cloud storage for $4.99 per month -- or even less.

There are two plans to choose from: an Unlimited Photos Plan for about $.99 per month, for photos only (although an additional 5GB comes with it for videos and other data); and the Unlimited Everything Plan, with no caps on space or types of files, for $4.99 per month.

A three-month trial is available for either plan. The data will be kept on Amazon Cloud Drive. Those with Amazon Prime accounts and Amazon Fire devices (tablets and phones) already have unlimited space for photos, so Amazon is hoping they'll be tempted to upgrade to the Unlimited Everything Plan.

The new plans are aimed squarely at AWS competitors such as Dropbox, Box, Google Inc., Microsoft and Apple Inc., who all offer similar plans of cheap, vast storage. Google Drive, for example, offers up to 15GB of storage for free, 100GB for $1.99 per month, and 1TB for $9.99 per month. The latest Amazon.com pricing undercuts that plan by half, so it wouldn't be surprising to see Google update its plan with a less-expensive offering in the near future.

Microsoft, for its part, offers 15GB of space on OneDrive for free, and $6.99 per month for 1TB.

Amazon.com touted its plans. "Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don't know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up," Josh Petersen, director of Amazon Cloud Drive, said in a press release. "With the two new plans … 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."