Less than a decade ago, a terabyte of personal online storage would have been nearly unthinkable. Now Google is making a terabyte of cloud storage available for just $10.
Check out Google Drive's new pricing structure which now offers the first 15GB per month for free. For $100 a month, Google offers as much space you could ever need: 10 terabytes or more.
Google Drive's new pricing structure is great for users, who benefit from more attractive prices from one of the foremost companies in data storage—especially when you compare them against paid plans from Google's cloud competitors.
Dropbox charges $9.99/month for 100GB, but Google Drive charges just $2/month for the same amount of space.
SugarSync offers one terabyte of data for $55 per month for up to three users; in Google Drive, that same storage costs $10 a month.
Apple asks for $100 per year (or $8.33 a month) for 50 GB of iCloud storage; you can get twice the storage each month and pay a quarter of the price with Google Drive.
Microsoft’s OneDrive, which only features annual plans, starts at 50GB for $25 per year. Google Drive offers roughly the same price per year, but offers twice as much storage as Microsoft does each month. Microsoft offers 7 GB of storage for free to new users as a taste to get them onto a subscription plan.
If you thought Google Drive offered savings for consumers, it's even better for developers.
Amazon's popular S3 cloud service, which is a favorite among developers (Dropbox included), costs roughly $85/month for a terabyte of space. Similarly, the cheapest plans on Microsoft's Azure platform cost about $68 per month for 1 TB. To reiterate, Google only asks for $10 a month for 1 TB.
Turning Cloud Storage Into A Commodity
A cheaper Google Drive means more money goes directly to the company, but more importantly, it benefits Google's entire ecosystem.
Google Drive may not be the company's sexiest offering, but it is one of its most important. Drive is the glue that binds Google's family of productivity apps together: It's the home for Docs, Slides and Sheets (Google's answer to Microsoft's Office suite of apps), it contains all of your photos from Google+ and it's the foundation for storage options within Gmail, Google's popular email service.
Ideally, Google's new prices will push other cloud services to do the same; in some ways, as ReadWrite contributor Matt Asay notes, it's already begun happening. If anything, lower prices will push greater adoption rates which, in turn, provide greater focus on optimizing infrastructure to the cloud. Google's competitive prices will ultimately benefit the entire technology ecosystem, from individuals users and developers to startups and enterprises.
Cloud computing is already outpacing traditional data workloads; thanks to the latest push from Google Drive, the public cloud takes one more step towards becoming the norm for all storage needs.
What Google has done with its Drive pricing strategy is transform cloud storage from an expensive feature into a commodity function available for a nominal fee. This could change the entire business model for personal storage companies like Evernote and Dropbox and every company in the personal cloud space is now on notice.
Drive, of course, is also where those images you store on Google+ Photos go. And say what you want about Google+, its photo storage and sharing features (and Google Hangouts) are among its best features. Storage for images under 2048×2048 pixels (that’s about 4.2 megapixel) is even free, though chances are your phone now takes images at a higher resolution, so unless you just want to store low-res backups on Google+ Photos, you will soon start needing Google’s paid plans.
With these recent price cuts, Google locks the competition into a price war where it’s hard to beat because it even undercuts the usual wholesale prices for online storage. At the same time, it’s ramping up investments around its products that use its storage service to shut down competition in that area, too.
The next few months sure look like they’ll be interesting…
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