You often here people say you can buy anything on Amazon, and it certainly seems like it when you spend a few minutes checking out the Amazon.com website. Truth be told, there are a few things you can’t buy on Amazon, such as elephants and wisdom, but you can for sure buy cloud storage space. Amazon Web Services is more than happy to sell you as much cloud storage as you need, and at prices that won’t bust your budget.
On Thursday, March 26th, Amazon announced it was launching two new unlimited cloud storage plans that let users stash either just photos or any kind of file you want.
Details on Amazon’s new unlimited cloud storage plans
The online retail giant’s new Unlimited Photos plan is pegged at $12 a year, and it does include up to 5 gigabytes for videos or other files. The Unlimited Everything plan comes in at $60 a year, but it lets you store as many photos, videos, documents, movies and music as you want. You can sign up for either plan as a no-cost three-month trial.
Of note, Amazon has an existing Unlimited Photos plan for Fire tablet/phone owners and Prime customers ($99 a year for unlimited two-day shipping and several other perks).
Amazon Web Services has been a major player in cloud services for some time, and they’re apparently looking to expand their market share. AWS’s business model has been “renting” its data centers’ storage, processing power and apps to companies to firms that don’t want to buy their own servers. Today’s announcement means Amazon is looking to compete directly with Apple, Google, Dropbox and thers in offering consumer cloud services. Software titan Microsoft announced it was offering unlimited cloud storage for its Office 365 subscription customers back in October
Amazon emphasized these new unlimited plans mean that customers no longer have to count or guess how much storage they’ll need across their different devices or networks. Analysts point out that the storage limits are constantly increasing, so other new cloud storage plans that approach or match Amazon’s new unlimited cloud services plan are almost inevitable.
