Amazon announced recently that it will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan for the company ’ s Amazon Drive storage solution .
The company launched Cloud Drive Unlimited back in March 2015 . Users who signed up for an “Unlimited Everything” account back then were not restricted in terms of online storage space .
The company did offer another plan , “unlimited photos ”, which provided customers with options to store an unlimited number of photos on Amazon ’ s cloud servers .
Amazon Unlimited Photos has been part of Amazon Prime as well for no extra cost .
Back then we concluded that Amazon ’ s Cloud Unlimited plan gave customers more storage for the money than any other service out there. The biggest gripe we had was not related directly to the unlimited storage plan , but to the Amazon Cloud Drive client that customers had to use to sync data with the cloud .
The program was inferior to the sync clients of companies like Dropbox . Another issue was that Amazon ’ s Cloud Storage service lacked online viewers for common file formats such as Office documents .
The frequently asked questions page on the Amazon website highlights the change .
Amazon makes it clear that it will shut down the Unlimited Storage plan .
Amazon is now providing options for customers to choose the storage plan that is right for them . Amazon will no longer offer an unlimited storage plan. Instead , we ’ ll offer storage plans of 100 GB for $11. 99 and 1 TB for $ 59. 99, up to 30 TB for an additional $ 59. 99 per TB .
Any customer that signs up for storage with Amazon automatically gets 5 GB for free , and Prime members receive free unlimited photo storage .
Customers get 1 TB of storage under the new structure instead of unlimited storage for $ 59 . 99 per year . This moves Amazon ’ s offering closer to other providers.
Here is how much other services charge for 1 Terabyte of online storage per year :
Google Drive : $ 99. 99 per year
Dropbox Plus : € 99 per year
Microsoft OneDrive : $ 69. 99 ( includes one - year Office 365 Personal subscription )
Amazon ’ s offering is still less expensive if you just look at the price and ignore other features that may be available when you sign up for a paid plan .
Amazon announced that the change will happen on June 8 , 2017 . Existing customers will keep the unlimited storage plan for the entire period of the contract , but won’ t be able to extend it anymore .
The following happens when the subscription expires :
Customers with less than 1 Terabyte of online storage space, and with auto - renew enabled , will be migrated to the 1 Terabyte plan for $ 59 . 99 per year .
Customers with more than 1 Terabyte of online space, or with auto - renew disabled , need to select a new plan manually on the Storage page.
Customers who are over - quota enter a 180 day grace period . This happens for instance when no new plan is selected if manual action is required. This makes the storage read only in that time period .
If nothing is done in the period , content will be deleted automatically at the end of the grace period until the account is no longer over quota ( starting with newest content ) .
Prime members will retain the unlimited storage for photos , but the plan is no longer available to non - prime members.
Now You : are you affected by the change ? What is your take on it ?
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