INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
We have long known that the price of cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive have been getting cheaper over
Yesterday launch of Google Onein the United States dropped the price for Google storage even further, cutting the cost per terabyte per
month in half, driving this point home even more clearly.
As Frederic Lardinois pointed out in his post, 2 terabytes of storage now costs
Consider that without joining Google One, that was the same price for 1 terabyte of storage
By signing up for Google One, you could double your storage without paying one penny more, and let face it this was a ton of storage before
the change.
Let compare that with some of the other players out there
Each one is a little different, but the storage costs tell a story.
Google One shift to 2 TB for $9.99 a month puts it in line with Apple
pricing, which surprisingly had given you the most storage bang for your buck out of these four companies before Google One came along
Who would have thought that Apple was giving its users the best price on anything Of course, you get access to Office 365, including Word
and PowerPoint, with your terabyte of Microsoft OneDrive storage, which is going to add a fair bit of value for many users over and above
the pure storage being offered.
Regardless, if you consider Apple and Google pricing, the price of a terabyte of cloud storage has dropped
That pretty darn cheap and it shows just how commoditized online storage has become and how much scale you require to make money.
Alan
Pelz-Sharpe, principal analyst at Deep Analysis, who has been watching this space for years says that consumer cloud storage pricing has
always been a race to the bottom
&You can only make a margin with mass scale
That why firms who are not Microsoft, Amazon or Google are pushing hard for business and enterprise customers
Google One just brings that message home,& he said.
If you get enough scale, as Dropbox has with an estimated 500 million users, if you can
get a percentage to pay $8.25 a month for a terabyte of storage, it can add up to real money
When Dropbox filed its S-1 to before it went public earlier this year, it reported more than $1 billion in consumer revenue
It would be difficult if not impossible for a startup launching today to compete with the existing players, but the ones out there continue
to compete with one another, driving the cost down even further.
Today announcement is just another step in that downward price pressure of
consumer cloud storage, and when you get double the storage from one day to the next for the exact same price, it shows just how true that
