Amazon Now Offering Cheap Unlimited Cloud Storage

Amazon today launched two new plans for its Amazon Cloud Drive service and both seems a better good deal compared to similar services being offered by its competitors. Amazon's new plans are a lot cheaper than the competition. According to Life Hacker, 1TB on Dropbox runs $100/year, on Google Drive it's $120/year, and iCloud charges $240/year.

In the case of Amazon, for those who already have a Prime membership, they can get unlimited photo storage for free, or if you want to upgrade, you can get unlimited storage for just $59.99/year. According to the company, they are now offering the following options:

• Unlimited Photos Plan (free 3-month trial, then $11.99 per year-equivalent of less than $1 per month): Store an infinite number of photos in Cloud Drive without worrying about taking up space on phones, cameras, or other devices. Customers can upload existing collections and store all future photos taken. This plan also includes 5 GB of additional storage for videos or other documents and files.

• Unlimited Everything Plan (free 3-month trial, then $59.99 per year-equivalent of less than $5 per month): Store an infinite number of new and existing photos, videos, files, documents, movies, and music in Cloud Drive.

Amazon is not the first to offer "unlimited" storage, but it looks like it's the first to market this as a service to the average consumer or to anyone who wants it. As observed by Tech Crunch, Dropbox, for example, offers unlimited storage as part of Dropbox for Business. Google also aims unlimited options currently but at specific verticals with its Drive for Work for enterprises. Microsoft also offers a business user-focused service for those who subscribe to Office 365.

Josh Petersen, Director of Amazon Cloud Drive, in a statement said: "Most people have a lifetime of birthdays, vacations, holidays, and everyday moments stored across numerous devices. And, they don't know how many gigabytes of storage they need to back all of them up. With the two new plans we are introducing today, customers don't need to worry about storage space-they now have an affordable, secure solution to store unlimited amounts of photos, videos, movies, music, and files in one convenient place."