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Amazon Is Killing Off Its $12/Year Plan For Unlimited Photo Storage (petapixel.com)

Posted by msmash on from the storage-space-nazi dept.

To many's surprise, Amazon introduced a consumer-focused storage option -- unlimited photo backup for only $12 per year. This was Amazon's attempt to lure customers away from Google, Dropbox, and iCloud. But it seems, even for Amazon, $12 per year for so much storage space is not feasible. The company has reportedly started to inform the customers that the plan is being discontinued. PetaPixel reports: Subscribers of the plan, which was launched in March 2015, are taking to the web to report receiving an email from Amazon informing them of the change. Amazon is offering customers free months of the Unlimited Storage plan, which costs $60 per year. It seems that some people are being offered a standard 3-month free trial of the service, while others are being offered a 12-month free period.

50 comments

  1. Bait and switch? by dknj · · Score: 1, Interesting

    How are we ignoring the blatent false advertising. They had to have made fiscal projections which show its a money loser over the long term. This was entirely a marketing campaign for Amazon to hook more users onto its service and they should be. I'm so mad that I want to spend my money somewhere else, but it would appear amazon has a monopoly in this online retail market.

    -dk

    1. Re:Bait and switch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      huh? a monopoly? thats absurd.

    2. Re:Bait and switch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bluntly? Because we've actually never had it so good (thanks Supermac).

    3. Re:Bait and switch? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 1

      it would appear amazon has a monopoly in this online retail market.

      I am a happy Amazon customer, and I feel a lack of outrage over this photo storage change, but if you are looking for an alternative online retailer there is Jet.com which offers a similar range of products at comparable prices.

    4. Re:Bait and switch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It wasn't unlimited anyway. I think it capped out at something like 200GB -- I honestly don't remember as it's been a couple years since I've even thought about it. I know when I tried to move my (admittedly VERY large number of) photos there it crapped out partway through and complained about reaching a storage limit -- a weird thing for an unlimited service. Perhaps they contracted out to Verizon to build it, I'm not sure.

    5. Re:Bait and switch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This is a perfect example of why anyone who trusts cloud storage is a moron. Even huge corporations with piles of cash pull the plug on their services at any time, without warning forcing users to have to scramble to find an alternative.

      Just grab a couple of large hard drives, SSDs, flash drives, whatever and keep your own stuff backed up. That way you can be 100% guaranteed that your ability to access and use YOUR data will never simply disappear like this.

    6. Re: Bait and switch? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's not that infeasible. Companies like amazon need a lot of disk throughput compared to the disk space. Disk size increase very quickly whereas throughput grows slowly. Therefore any monetization of a low throughput high volume usage is worse it. Maybe they found out the ratio of the users of their offer was not that low ...

  2. Business Model by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    1. Offer service at unfeasible but greater than zero price.
    2. Lure a lot of people to your service.
    3. Announce that you need to raise price
    4. Rely on inertia to keep a significant percentage of your customers.
    5. Profit

  3. They HAD this service? by unixisc · · Score: 2

    First time I've heard of this. I always used the default cloud services that came w/ the phones/tablets I use - Google Drive, iCloud and OneDrive. Since I once bought Office365, I happen to have 1TB of storage on OneDrive, which I use for the bulk of those. The 5GB that seems to be the default is pretty inadequate given the number of videos people send

    1. Re:They HAD this service? by CannonballHead · · Score: 2

      I had heard of this, but at the time, I didn't like their cloud software... I dunno, it just didn't integrate well with my phone, Linux, Windows, etc. OneDrive actually has a lot better support. There's even a little service someone wrote to have it do filesystem sync stuff on Linux. I think I only pay like $2/mo for 200gb or something like that, which is all I need at the moment... backup everything of value to OneDrive, backup everything of super importance to Spideroak, and also use Google Photos / Music / Amazon Music for convenience.

    2. Re:They HAD this service? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Must be nice to have less total data than my photo collection for CY2016 alone. :-)

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

    3. Re:They HAD this service? by CannonballHead · · Score: 1

      Ha, yeah. I realize my usage is not at all similar to people who take a lot of photos. I don't have tons of [high res] pictures or ripped movies or anything like that... and the movies that I have, I have the DVDs for, so I just do local backups for those.

      Most of my ... I don't recall how much, 150gb or so ... *is* photos (since we got a decent camera) and music, and it's growing, but we're not going to hit 1TB anytime soon. I have more stuff like games, the aforementioned ripped DVDs, ISOs, VMs, etc., but I don't have any reason to back that up other than locally, since it is all recoverable.

    4. Re:They HAD this service? by dgatwood · · Score: 1

      Start shooting in RAW mode. You'll hit a terabyte before you know it. Better yet, get a 5D Mark IV and use Dual-Pixel RAW so that 5% more image data can take 100% more space. I mean, you'd think they would have used sum-difference encoding, sign-magnitude encoding (with a single-bit right rotation so the sign bit is on the right), and bitwise run-length encoding (all the top-order bits first) to make that file format efficient, but instead, they encoded the sum of the two images followed by one of the two images by itself, both using lossless JPEG. I can't imagine what they were thinking. The impact of dual-pixel RAW should have been an order of magnitude less than it is.

      --

      Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.

  4. Prime Sub by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Prime subscription still comes with unlimited photo storage (and 5gb other file storage). Upgrade to unlim everything is still another $60. I think they should at least discount that for customers who already spend the $100/yr for prime.

    1. Re:Prime Sub by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      yeah - aim seems to be, shift punters from the $12 standalone onto $100 Prime, where unlimited photo is included.

      'Three months FREE!' trial of the $60 unlimited everything (not just photos) as apology for cancelling the $12 plan? - I'd tell them exactly where to stick that, you get three months free trial of unlimited anyway. They just taking the piss - if the plan exists (still..) for Prime?, it can exist for those who paid their money for it, at the advertised price. Its not difficult, Amazon.

    2. Re:Prime Sub by Streetlight · · Score: 1

      I was just going to post that Prime subs get unlimited photo storage at full quality. How long will that last?

      Google has unlimited photo storage but compressed to 12 mega pixels. Works well for my 12 mega pixel Nexus 6P camera. And Microsoft's One Drive gives up 1 T Bytes of storage for Office 365 subscribers and varying amounts depending on previous history of its use. IIRC, I have 40 G bytes on One Drive, others may have more or less.

      --
      In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
  5. My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

    Buy a MicroSD card.

    Let's face it, folks: 'The Cloud' was a gigantic troll from the beginning, too many of you fell for it, and too many people continue to fall for it. You want your photos and important data available to you quickly and easily, with little to no downtime, chance of being hacked, or chance of data lost forever? Get your own local storage. Unless you're storing all your digital photos as uncompressed bitmap files, you can store tens to hundreds of thousands of jpeg photos on a microSD card. 'The Cloud' really doesn't make any sense anymore when you keep getting the rug yanked out from under you like this, or in any number of other ways.

    1. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by networkBoy · · Score: 1

      Or you don't subscribe to anything that fails the "too good to be true" test...

      Seriously, I use cloud storage for what I want high availability for. I pay $2/mo to google and I get 100 gigs. That's a good deal for me, and a money making (even if only barely) price for them.

      Sure I have TB of storage and such at home, but I make off-line backups and store them in a deposit box at my bank. I don't presume that TB of on-line space with good fault tolerance will be accessible to me for multiple reasons, one of which is cost.

      As to the Amazon offering: I wonder how many people used TIF files of simple pictures and loaded data into the file?
      or the ZIP/JPG trick?

      -nb

      --
      whois gawk date unzip strip find touch finger mount join nice man top fsck grep eject more yes exit umount sleep dump
    2. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Works really well for devices where you have micro SD slots available.

      That's not there in any iPhone or iPad, nor is it there in some phones like Moto X that have reasonable storage. That's when the Cloud becomes important. Also, on the cloud, one can set things up to back up one's messages - something not easily doable on SD cards

    3. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      But do you really truly need that or is there another way that doesn't involve sketchy 'services' that may or may not decide to be around later, or that is scanning what you're storing, or that might get hacked and all your data disappears? Do you have to use your phone for everything? Why not use your computer instead? MicroSD card adapters to USB are cheap and easily obtained; now is it easy enough? Or is 'convenience' so important that people are wiling to put up with these shenanigans?

    4. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by rubycodez · · Score: 0

      Your plan is even more foolish, sd cards can and do fail. Your plan makes no sense.

      Plenty of cloud storage vendors have been in business and working fine for years.

      face it, the only gigantic troll here is you.

    5. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by unixisc · · Score: 1

      True. I could have just plugged in my iPhone to my laptop, copied all the pictures into a removable drive of some sort - be it SD, USB or an USB hard drive. But it doesn't work w/ everything, though - I can't copy the messages, and also, I'd have to go out of my way to manually do it every time, as opposed to it being automatic every time I either shoot something or receive something.

    6. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      EVERYTHING can fail at any time for no particular reason. If your data is so valuable to you that you don't have it stored on more than one cheap, readily-available storage device, then you're the one who is foolish. I'd say you're more likely to be trolling than I ever am, seeing as how I'm promoting an inexpensive, one-time purchase, common sense approach to storing photos or other data, rather than uploading it to some server that you don't even know the physical location of, that can be hacked, that can lose your data, that can violate your data, and that you won't be able to hold accountable for any of the above. Now, explain to me again how being responsible for your own things makes less sense than sending to to Timbuktu in the care of complete strangers who, by the way, are taking your money every month for the 'privilege'? I don't think you can, and I wonder if you're really just trying to justify to yourself your own decisions and the money you've given these people and not any intelligent principle.

    7. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      you can lose all your SD cards and photos in plenty of accidents at home. Large enterprises have redundant data centers. If you encrypt your data it doesn't matter who steals a copy of the cloud files. You spend more on SD cards than I do on "cloud storage"

    8. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by KiloByte · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's not there in any iPhone or iPad

      So go buy a real phone, and for the price difference you can buy a lot of SD cards. Or, alternatively, you can backup that stuff to wherever you backup stuff from your regular computer (you do have backups, don't you?).

      --
      The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    9. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      Based on your other comments in other threads I think you just like to argue to argue, and because you have a pathological need to always be right and never be contradicted.

    10. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So you're excluding any photography enthusiast from your statement? Enthusiasts typically store photos in RAW format. A 200GB microSD card would store somewhere between 3-4k uncompressed photos for me. That's gonna set me back $80. Add another $80 for an offsite backup. And another $80 for a 2nd local backup (rotate between the locals every night for convenience, then swap out a local for the remote once every week or so). That sensible solution is at $240 for 4k photos.

      I have about 50,000 photos last time I checked (about a year ago). So that's now a $2400 solution.

      I think saying 'Buy a MicroSD card' was a bit disingenuous...

    11. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 1

      I shouldn't even respond to an AC like you, but I'll make an exception.

      1. How many people are 'enthusiasts' to the point where they need to store everything uncompressed like that? Not a very large percentage, I'm sure. For everyone else, a couple microSD cards are plenty.
      2. If you really need that much space for your photos, get a portable hard drive. They're not very expensive anymore either.
      3. If your 'photo enthusiasm' is that important to you, then I'd think you'd WANT to store your so-important photos locally, rather than trust some total strangers with them. Also, how much time are you wasting waiting for things to upload and download, if your files are that large? Also, are you actually viewing them on your phone, too? Your dataplan must be VERY expensive then.

      Sorry, no one is convincing me that 'the cloud' is a good idea, especially for the average person. Just another way to separate people from their money every month, forever. If you haven't noticed, that's the way everything is going these days: You don't 'own' anything, you 'rent' everything, and pay ad infinitum. It's a gigantic scam if you ask me. I'd much rather own my own things, and I'll keep recommending to people that they eschew 'the cloud' and all these other 'rental' scams.

    12. Re: My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You know what? I use a revolutionary backup strategy called "both".

    13. Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by unixisc · · Score: 1

      Only reason I have an iPhone is that I have family members who do, and who I want to FaceTime w/. Yeah, there is Google Duo NOW, but that's recent. My favorite phone, had I not needed FaceTime or Vonage, would have been the Lumia. I have a Moto X as well, and even that comes w/o the SD slot. If the Lumia had a native FaceTime like app, as well as at least ONE VOIP app like Vonage or 8x8, I'd switch to it.

    14. Re: My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan': by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah,that's fine for folk who can afford to buy a box load of high capacity hdd drives or similar,but not all of us are in that lucky group,some of us do not even have a pc,so what are we meant to do,cloud backup is for some of us the only option,I use multiple cloud services to back up pics etc to,Amazon prime membership is cheapish,and gets you unlimited pic storage,luckely,here in the UK,you can still get "un-limited' mobile data for a reasonable amount of cash per month,using that and multiple cloud accounts is cheaper than buying a pc,a box load of hdd drives and the monthly charge for a fixed line data package,yes it would be nice to do if I could,but I simply cannot afford it,and due to having to move quite often due to short term house rentals,a fixed line data pipe brings loads of problems when you have to transfer it to a new address possibly twice a year...
      Consider yourself lucky that you can afford what you want/need,just remember we are not all so lucky...

  6. Google photos by fred6666 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Does it for free. Even though they recompress the pictures and downsize to 16 MP, you can't beet free.

  7. does any home user still really back up? by nimbius · · Score: 1

    how often do home hard drives fail? does the average user still need "cloud backup" with the existence of cheap SSD's and cheaper spinning drives? Ive had my Seagate for 9 years now and it hasnt had so much as a single error. i thought abBBB$G$$[NO CARRIER]

    --
    Good people go to bed earlier.
    1. Re:does any home user still really back up? by unixisc · · Score: 1

      While removable drives - like USB and SD - would satisfy the requirement you describe, I'm not sure that the same is true about home hard drives. Sometimes, even if a computer fails, those hard drives might get screwed and the data not recoverable.

  8. That's a stupid plan by SuperKendall · · Score: 1

    how often do home hard drives fail?

    They only need to fail once for something you have no copy of...

    Also I am pretty sure they fail 100% of the time your laptop is stolen and/or there's a fire in your house that melts your HD. Are you saying houses do not catch on fire? That laptops are never stolen?

    Your plan is lunacy. Backups aren't about any one unlikely thing, they are about a world of unlikely possibilities weighed against the loss of many things (even if virtual) that are literally irreplaceable.

    does the average user still need "cloud backup"

    The "average user" needs those things more because they do not have as deep an understanding of what will and will not be lost if the device breaks or vanishes.

    --
    "There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
  9. What a shock by epyT-R · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This is why SaaS should never be used for anything but the largest of systems, and only if a private datacenter is out of the question. No one else should use it for anything important. Price models, functionality, interfaces, and APIs can and will change at a moment's notice, and the EULA will back that play every time. The business model trumps user needs. While this can happen with traditional software, at least the user has final say on if, when, and where that happens because the old version doesn't stop working (or can be cracked to do so if desperate).

    1. Re:What a shock by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, this is ridiculous. It can takes months of uploading on most connections to upload that much data, it's not like switching services is as easy as entering your CC number on a new site. I use Crashplan because of the unlimited plan, but I keep my own local backups as well just to be safe.

    2. Re:What a shock by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 1

      Imagine if you'd just finished up a year's worth of uploading on your DSL line, and now you have a month to find another service.

      I knew it was too good to be true (and I suspect Amazon did too...) but ordinary prosumers don't know what enterprise storage costs.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  10. Unlimited == blank check by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's dangerous to offer customers unlimited storage or whatever. There's the chance that some customers could abuse it, and store gigantic amounts of data. If enough customers abused the privilege, that could cause real problems for the company.

    1. Re:Unlimited == blank check by Streetlight · · Score: 1

      IIRC, Microsoft early on offered unlimited storage for Sky Drive, now One Drive. There was one account that had something like 70 T Bytes of data. That's a T, as in Terra. That's 1,000 Giga bytes. Not likely a single person but probably a "shared" account where a number of folks had the login name and password. A single home user wouldn't likely have the data speed to put all that stuff up even if their USP had no data limits. When MS noticed this they drastically reduced free storage limits.

      --
      In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. George Orwell
  11. Who kills more projects quicker? by The+Fat+Bastid · · Score: 1

    Between Google and Amazon, I wonder who kills more projects and what their lifespans are. I remember waiting on Amazon's credit card swiper until they had a chip version. The rates were better than square and others. Jokes on me, they killed the whole program instead of making one.

  12. Cloud storage by John+Allsup · · Score: 2

    There is a tradeoff in cloud storage between hard drive failure and business model failure. For me, the MTBF of a cloud storage business model seems to be drastically shorter than that of my desktop hard drives.

    --
    John_Chalisque
  13. 3 and 12 Month Trial Periods by skegg · · Score: 1

    I wonder if there is logic (versus error) to the two trial periods being offered: another example of dynamic pricing?

  14. At that price, just pay the extra $39/yr for Prime by Solandri · · Score: 1

    Prime comes with unlimited photo storage, along with a bunch of other stuff.

  15. Problem with the term, "Unlimited" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    That's the downside to using "Unlimited" in marketing claims, some people are going to actually try to take advantage of it. Example: rip and convert all your DVDs to individuaL JPGs set to minimal compression, and upload the whole mess. Write an app that runs in the cloud that scrapes the web for image files and adds them to your storage, and thereby isn't even using your bandwidth. Now Amazon has to keep all of that backed up as well, so their storage costs.skyrocket. Advertising "unlimited" anything is a Bad Idea (TM), except maybe for all-you-can-eat restaurants, and even that is debatable.

  16. "Amazon only lowers prices" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    is an often used argument by Amazon sales staff; I am guessing the cost of their customer acquisition is now going up by more than it would have costed to keep this service alive. Building a brand is expensive, burning it is cheap. Today is the day Amazon learned that lesson.

  17. Great business plan by um...+Lucas · · Score: 1

    Offer consumers cheap photo storage at extremely low cost, find out that customers will actually take you at your word, discontinue service... Great going.

    Amazon isn't unique. I signed up for Google Fi, but was reminded how Google can cancel services I like at the drop of a hat, the latest example in that case being their abandonment of Google Wallet, and decided to pass of Fi.

  18. Here's the exact email by QuebecNerd · · Score: 1

    I was on that plan and I recently received the email. Here's the exact wording:

    "Hello,

    We recently learned that you received an email incorrectly announcing your Unlimited Photos plan was being changed into an Unlimited Storage trial. We're very sorry about this. We meant to let you know that the Unlimited Photos storage plan is no longer available, but you can continue to use your plan until it ends.

    To make up for this, we are giving you 12 free months of the Unlimited Storage plan, which lets you store as many photos, videos, and other files as you like. When your promotional Unlimited Storage plan ends, you will be charged $59.99 for a one-year plan. You can cancel your promotional plan at any time.

    This offer is valid until your current plan expires. Please accept this offer on your “Manage Storage” page: https://www.amazon.com/gp/phot...

    We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

    Sincerely,

    Customer Service Department
    Amazon.com"

    I will take the freebie but not sure if I'm going to continue after that. I have 2.5TB of uploaded RAW photos. It took a while to upload that and it sucks that I may have to do it again. The freebie will expire in 2018 so we'll see what's available at that point.

  19. Alternatives by Delimiter · · Score: 1

    Disclaimer - I work for Delimiter This was meant to be announced on Monday but my colleagues have already posted it elsewhere. So enjoy: https://www.delimiter.com/objs... This is ObjSpace, its S3 compatible which is not perfectly positioned to Amazon's consumer product but with the number of tools using S3 these days for sync or serving content this may in ways be a better solution if you are looking to have choice of client and want the option to serve content directly from the object storage.