Microsoft gives 15GB of cloud storage to everyone, 1TB to Office 365 subscribers

Microsoft is more than doubling the amount of free cloud storage you get when you sign up for the company’s OneDrive service. Previously you got 7GB for free. Now you get 15GB.

Want more storage? you can pay for it… plans start at $1.99 per month for 100GB… but if you pay for a subscription to the company’s Office 365 service you’ll get 1TB of storage for no additional fee. That’s a lot of space for your Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files (along with just about anything else you’d care to store in the cloud).

Cloud storage services like OneDrive provide a way to backup files from your computer, share files with other users, and access your files from multiple computers. When you combine OneDrive with Microsoft Office, you can save your documents to the internet and access them across all of your devices so you can create a presentation on your desktop, edit it on your laptop, and display it on your iPad, for example.

The new pricing could make Office 365 subscriptions a bit more attractive. Microsoft’s subscription plan for Office involves paying an annual fee to use Office instead of a one-time cost, but you get access to any new versions of Office as part of your subscription. For folks that usually pay for each new version of Microsoft’s office suite, that could actually make a subscription a cheaper option… especially when Office 365 Personal subscribers also get 1TB of storage as part of their $6.99 per month plan.

Office 365 Home users can run Office on up to 5 devices… and if you have 5 different users, they each get their own 1TB of cloud storage as part of the $9.99 per month service.

Microsoft is hardly the only company offering a large amount of free cloud storage. Google Driver users also get 15GB for free, Box provides 10GB, and some Chinese companies are providing up to 10TB of storage for free.