If you want to sell something close to cost, you need to reflect the pricing structure of what you're paying to your customers. Similarly, when you have a bunch of data shoved into unused sections of disk, you can't just read them back out without affecting whatever else is reading from the same disk. You can't just buy GBs of egress at $0.01 and then resell them at $0.01, because you're paying for maximum capacity and turning around and selling average usage. Network and disk IO capacity planning is hard. > Cause you know, 60GB is realllly expensive to transfer :( If you don't know what you're doing and haven't read the docs you shouldn't be using Glacier. Both of these are approximately zero, most of the time, for most people, if they know what they're doing. There's a lot of articles about these things that seem to have the same summary: "I didn't read the documentation for how pricing works and then I was surprised by how pricing worked." Some people were shocked by Glacier's egress pricing and others were shocked by the cost per file. I wonder how long it'll be before media hoarders hide their content in Google/Prime Photos with a convenient CLI tool? The only time I see it discussed, especially the "unlimited" tier, is on /r/datahoarders and /r/seedboxes as an exploitable deal.Īs far as I can tell, Prime Photos will remain unlimited. I don't personally know anyone, in real life, who uses Amazon Drive. But it's not a one-sided issue and I thought I'd bring that up. Of course, I agree that you shouldn't call something "Unlimited" if it isn't. Suddenly that sounds more like abuse IMO. Wander over to /r/PlexShares to get an idea: imagine if someone had 20TB of 4K and BluRay movies stored on your service a very generous $60/yr, streaming that data 24/7 to 10, 15, maybe 20 people via Plex (with each streamer paying the media manager $10 a month) all over the world. Not to mention, much of this media is accessed and streamed often. The ugly fact is the Unlimited Amazon Drive has been abused by media pirates and data-hoarders to store up to 20TB (and sometimes more) at what any reasonable person would say is an unreasonable cost. Is that a business problem or a customer abuse problem? If you go to an all-you-can eat buffet, you will eventually be unwelcome after you have 20 plates stacked on your table. The trouble here is, I think, "unlimited" tends to just mean "a lot" and for Average Joe that's fine. Time and time again we're seeing startups burn through their capital subsidizing the storage as some sort of brilliant marketing plan. Again, users were given very little notice, and there was talk of a class-action lawsuit. Users were given very little notice, and had to move elsewhere.īitcasa, one of the original "unlimited" cloud storage providers (and a TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield finalist) crashed and burned three years in. A few years in and Barracuda shut down the entire service. SugarSync had an unlimited plan, but eventually dropped it.īarracuda offered virtually unlimited cloud storage with their service. Mozy had an unlimited plan, and then dropped it and raised prices. Users were then given the choice of deleting their files, or moving elsewhere. After millions of users bought in, Microsoft dropped the maximum storage to 1 TB. Microsoft OneDrive included unlimited storage with any Office 365 subscription. And for those unwilling to pay, there's now a fixed storage tier, which is slightly cheaper than the original price, but it's capped at 1 TB. The new unlimited plan is $20.00 / user / month. Just recently Dropbox announced pricing changes, which will take effect in 2018. When Dropbox for Business launched, it was $12.50 / user / month for "all the storage you need". Users feel slighted, and the trustworthiness of the cloud in general is gradually eroded, as the scenario plays itself out over and over. This strategy is the worst possible scenario for our entire industry. It's frustrating to watch cloud companies subsidize their storage, in order to break into the market with a product that is too good to be true.