A little over two years ago Amazon began offering unlimited Cloud Drive storage to customers who paid $60 per year. Now the company is ending that offer.
Starting today, any customer who signs up for Cloud Drive storage will be able to opt for 100GB for $12 per year or 1TB for $60 per year. Customers who have already paid for unlimited storage will get to keep it until the end of their service term… but if they renew the plan, their online storage will be capped at 1TB.
If you need more than a terabyte of online storage, you can get it… but you’ll have to pay more. Amazon offers up to 30TB of storage, but you’ll pay $60 for each terabyte (so it’d cost $1,800 per year to max out your Amazon Cloud Drive storage).
Amazon Prime members do continue to get two perks for free:
- Unlimited Cloud Drive backups for photos taken on their smartphones
- 5GB of free storage for any other types of files
So what happens if you’ve already got more than 1TB of data stored online, and don’t want to pay more than $60 per year when your plan renews? Amazon won’t delete your files… but the company won’t let you upload any new files until you clear up some space in your Cloud Drive account.
Existing customers can change or cancel their Cloud Drive plans at any time.
Amazon Cloud Drive is the only cloud service which has TRUE 1 TB storage. For $60 a year that is an enormous bargain. But there is no Direct Access to files. Can i upload via ftp clients??