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

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.

Comments

They HAD this service?

[unixisc]

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

Re:They HAD this service?

[CannonballHead]

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.

My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan':

[Rick Schumann]

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.

Re:My proposed '$12/year photo storage plan':

[KiloByte]

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?).

Google photos

[fred6666]

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

What a shock

[epyT-R]

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).

Cloud storage

[John Allsup]

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.