Amazon revealed it’s ending unlimited storage for Amazon Drive customers paying $60 on an annual basis, and replacing that offer with a 1TB tier. A new tier is also being introduced; it costs $11.99 and will get you 100GB of storage for a year. All users will now also get 5GB of cloud storage for free, the company said. All Amazon Prime customers will still have access to unlimited photo storage, but the above limits apply to any other types of files. Customers who are signed up for the unlimited storage option will get it for the rest of their plan time, while those signing up at the $60 level today will get 1TB of storage. Customers who want more than 1TB of storage can pay an extra $60 per year for each additional terabyte, the Seattle, Washington-based tech giant said.
Unlimited customers on auto-renew will find their storage knocked down to 1TB whenever a new payment is sent in. Users whose storage is knocked down, who decide to downgrade their plan, or who decide to let their plan lapse will have 180 days to grab their data before Amazon starts deleting it. Deletion will begin with the newest uploads and will continue until the account’s total storage is within its limits. Buying a plan that covers all of your data will stop the deletion, but buying a plan that doesn’t will not change the period after which your newest uploads start initializing deletion to get your data down to your plan allotment. That will still happen 180 days from the date that your original plan ended, regardless of when you buy a new plan.
The ending of the unlimited offer parallels similar stories from other cloud storage providers. Using an unlimited plan to get new signups and then later doing away with that plan is a fairly common practice in the cloud storage space. While many customers may never even exceed the 1TB threshold, there are likely more than enough people with tons of files to store that offering a cheap unlimited option can become unsustainable for many providers, or cloud storage providers probably wouldn’t employ this tactic as often as they do.