Amazon ends its unlimited data storage deal for Amazon Drive

If you’re one of the many users of Amazon’s cloud storage service, Amazon Drive, bad news. The e-commerce site just killed off its unlimited cloud storage deal, effective immediately.

 

Before this, Amazon customer only needed to pay up to US$60 (approx. RM256) year to gain access to the service, but as per The Verge’s report, Amazon will now instead be offering two subscription tiers, 100GB for US$11.99 (approx. RM51.50) a year, and 1TB for US$60 (approx. RM256) a year. If you’re looking to top off your storage space, you can do so for an additional US$60 a year per terabyte, but each user will only have a maximum top up limit of 30TB.

 

The new changes have already been implemented with immediate effective, but Amazon Drive subscribers who had paid the unlimited storage fee prior will still be able to keep the offer until the deal’s expiry date (expiration dates differ from subscription to subscription). If they still have their auto-renew turned on for the service, the plan will then be automatically changed to the new plan once their previous plan expires.

 

While this news might sound a little perturbing, there is a bit of good news for Amazon customers. Consumers signed up on Amazon Prime will still get unlimited photo storage as part of their membership, while Amazon Drive subscribers will also get 5GB of photo storage space for free.

 

Amazon isn’t the first company to kill off its unlimited cloud storage option. Back in 2014, Microsoft themselves made the same decision with its OneDrive cloud storage platform, citing that some customers took advantage of this service to its fullest potential, with some having exceeded the 75TB marker.

 

Amazon users taking advantage of the unlimited storage deal, take heed: if you have no intention of paying for either one of Amazon’s storage plans, you’ll be given a grace period of 180 days to download or delete your data. At the end of that allotted time, Amazon will then start deleting content (starting with the most recent uploads) until your account’s capacity is within the new limits.