Google Will Make Its Paid Storage Plans Cheaper (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report:Google is rolling out new changes to its storage plans that include a new, low-cost storage plan and half off the price of its 2TB storage option, the company announced today. It's also converting all Google Drive paid storage plans to Google One, perhaps in part because you'll now have one-tap access to Google's live customer service.

Google One will get a new $2.99 a month option that gets you 200GB of storage. The 2TB plan, which usually costs $19.99 per month, will now cost $9.99 a month. Finally, the 1TB plan that costs $9.99 a month is getting removed. The other plans for 10, 20, or 30TB won't see any changes.

Comments

Cheaper? Just trying to be relevant

[vk2]

Between backblaze b2 and wasabi.com using duplicity software - only the non-technical folks will fall for this.

Re:Cheaper? Just trying to be relevant

[war4peace]

I'm using Backblaze B2 for my local data backup and sync, but at the same time I am using Google's Docs, Sheets and mail with some attachments. I am currently using 13 GB out of 15 and I'm considering upgrading to the next tier.

Re:Cheaper? Just trying to be relevant

[MightyYar]

backblaze b2 and wasabi.com

They really are different products, but this price is now inline with wasabi.com and better than B2.

Give us tour data

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll make it cheaper for you to be spied on

It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[war4peace]

You can pay yearly.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is still very expensive. $10 a month is $120 per year. Since hard drive storage only costs about $25 per TB to actually buy one of those 2 TB, 3 TB, or bigger drives, they break even on the storage costs at about 5 months. Even sooner when you consider that they utilize all their space. Your local 4 TB hard drive will be half empty if you only store 2 TB of data on it. Google will fill up any extra space with someone else's data. There are other costs running a big data center to be sure, but their margins at even the new price are still very good.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

Many years ago before the term "cloud" was a buzz word I used my home Internet connection combined with Webmin and Usermin to have my own, easy to use, remote storage. This was before USB flash drives were even a thing.

If it weren't for the fact ISP's tend to like to combat home hosting through port blocking these days (even if I do know how to get around it), I think I would be doing that again. I'm about to get a new ISP, we'll see.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Junta]

In this specific scenario, you aren't paying for disk space, you are paying for them to have responsibility for keeping the data available, and having it at a persistently accessible location. That means some chunk of electricity, network connectivity, and costs associated with replacing storage capacity, and various other requirements. In terms of paying for a decade, these providers are uncomfortable with the commitment of the service being available as the customer would like it more than a year out or so, which of course should be a warning flag that something may cause you to want to get a copy of *all* your data, and if you have not proactively been doing so, that may be impossible to grab your 6TB of whatever in time to react to whatever Google thing you don't like.

Of course, if you were of the mind to do it yourself with hard drives, you would probably want the primary live copy of the data and two offline copies (one you take to work and stick in your desk, one that might be at home being backed up, cycling between the two. Of course such a scheme would be about $300 for 4 TB right now and it would take 15 months to be cheaper than using Wasabi, but egress is much easier. It is however a pretty technical solution out of reach of a lot of folks.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[darkain]

The counter argument is that it isn't JUST storage though. Add in the power and maintenance costs. Add in the data redundancy/resiliency. Add in the ability to easily share the content stored on GDrive with others. If you only look at the cost from just a raw storage standpoint, yes local storage is cheaper. But as soon as your single drive dies, you lose everything. GDrive, AWS S3, BackBlaze, etc all use redundant storage with file chunks spread across multiple disks in multiple servers across multiple full racks. Now, if that isn't worth something to you, that's perfectly fine and you're more than welcome to purchase your own local storage. But if you care are off-site copies of content stored in a redundant fashion, these services are great.

As an FYI, one of my tasks was to help rebuild a business after they had a 100% total loss of all local computer and server systems after a fire destroyed their building. Using one of these "expensive" cloud providers, I was able to simply have them purchase a new server, log into their cloud account, and re-sync all of their content. Their new servers were already up and running long before they even had the office rebuilt and occupied. In this particular instance, remote storage was invaluable to the business.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, for some things a subscription model just makes sense. It's a good idea to also have a local backup that you can use for those cases where something gets fat fingered, most of the restores would be coming off that drive. But, buildings do burn down and occasionally people steal the hardware. Not to mention the possibility that the hardware just fails in a way that prevents recovery.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

I've been playing with. Syncthing. I'm seriously thinking about using it to make an offsite backup, already my documents are synced between my laptop and desktop using it, I'm pretty sure it would work if I decided to "go big" with it.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[swillden]

$10 a month is $120 per year. Since hard drive storage only costs about $25 per TB to actually buy one of those 2 TB, 3 TB, or bigger drives, they break even on the storage costs at about 5 months.

You mean 12 months. A 2TB drive costs $60, but since you aren't an idiot you don't buy just one, you buy two because you need one copy offsite. So you back up locally to one of them, then periodically run over to your mom's house (or wherever you're storing your offsite copy) and swap them. I'm assuming you don't need to include any allowance for your time because you're good and visit your mom regularly anyway. And I'm assuming you are methodical and not lazy and so always remember to do this drive swapping.

Personally, $100 per year (including the discount for paying annually instead of monthly), makes perfect sense for me. That's without even considering electricity or maintenance (drives are low maintenance until they fail).

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are paying for ... GOOGLE ... responsibility ... ha ... haha .... hehehe .... heHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHH

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[spoot]

I get 1TB 'free' with my google fiber account. Wonder if it is getting the upgrade too? I'm not holding my breath, but you never know. Use it to move somewhat large audio files to clients.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[ToddDTaft]

If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.

pCloud offers a "lifetime" cloud storage service for a one-time fee. Their definition of lifetime is the shorter of your lifetime or 99 years.

Disclaimer: I do not own, work for, or have any other financial interest in pCloud.

Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shillden, Shillden, Shillden! Keepin' it Googledouchey!

Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Reverend Green]

You really believe they will still be in business 5 years from now, let alone 99 years?

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Google charges ~€3/m for 200GB.
Cheapest RAID1 Synology ( = easy for mere mortals, like Google Drive) NAS is about €150 every 9 years = €1,39/m.
2x 320GB disks every 5 years (average life) = 2*€35 / 60 = €1,17/m.
Continuous 8W power in my country (NL) = €1,33/m.
Total: €3,89/m.
So, if you need 200GB and accept the bandwidth/privacy considerations etc, Google is competitive, and you're not responsible for managing it.
(yes, you can certainly get different outcomes with different parameters, but these are for my personal situation).

Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[ToddDTaft]

You really believe they will still be in business 5 years from now, let alone 99 years?

My point was that there are alternatives to cloud services that have a monthly or annual charge that never ends. As you point out, there are potential risks with these options.

Fundamentally, the risk that the cloud service provider stops providing the service you are using is a risk of any cloud service. The only way to completely prevent someone else's bad business decisions from affecting your data is to keep your data on servers you own that are located on property you own. Of course, you must have full control of the hardware, operating systems, software, etc. that are used to access your data (e.g. no DRM controlled by a 3rd party).

Even if this company shut down long before your lifetime or the 99 year term expire, you would still be saving money by purchasing their service if the service remains available for longer than it would have taken you to spend the same amount of money on a service that charges by the month or year. The lifetime service option that I mentioned in a previous post costs less than 5 years worth of the same service billed on a monthly/yearly basis at this company and most of its competitors.

Buying this service, of course, involves some risk related to the business continuity of pCloud. However, there have been plenty of other cloud services that have billed on a monthly or annual basis that have been discontinued with little or no warning (e.g. Xmarks), so monthly or annual charges are no guarantee that the service will remain available as long as you want it.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[nagora]

If your data is valuable then that would be a good argument. But if your data is valuable would you trust Google with it?

Just do a nightly incremental off-site backup to the IT Director's basement. If you can't trust him/her with the data then you're already screwed.

Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously dude do you have any idea how pathetic you look always commenting on your employerâ(TM)s stories? You were the biggest most shameless shill /.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you could add another drive to your computer. Or use any of the other much cheaper options that isn't an extremely expensive consumer NAS product from synology or any other company. You might even be able to get a laptop or even a small computer thats cheaper then a NAS.

There are so many better and cheaper options that makes 3 a month still expensive

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

So after the first year you are already saving money since nobody pays more then 25 per TB

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[MightyYar]

I formerly used a second hard drive as my sole backup. Lightning hit nearby and took out both hard drives - luckily between the two hard drives I was able to recover most of the files.

A second incident took out both hard drives when a mount failed and the top drive fell on to the lower drive.

You can dismiss me as a moron, or you can use my hard-won experience - no skin off my back. The point is now I make sure I have a backup at a separate geographic location, and now I understand why that is considered best practice.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Jason Levine]

I used to use this approach. I had two external hard drives with all of my data backed up on them. I'd take one drive and store it at my in-laws' house in case something (fire, theft) happened at my house. In theory, this system was great. The plan was that I'd regularly take the hard drive home, back everything up, and then take it back to my in-laws' house. The reality, though, was that I'd forget to back up for months at a time or would back up to the local hard drive and not to the remote one.

Now, I use BackBlaze to automatically back up everything to their servers. It's automatic so I don't need to think about it or remember it. It just happens. A meteor could smash my house to smithereens tomorrow and all of my data would be safe.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Junta]

Well, responsible for keeping the data available I said, did not necessarily suggest they will behave responsibly with the data, which is a bit different.

Of course on a whim they could decide they don't like being in the business and shut down, so I guess google has that challenge too (as do *all* the providers, always have to be ready to at least in theory start up your infrastructure elsewhere without notice).

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[iamhassi]

If I could pay a one-time charge, like buying a hard drive, or even a once a decade thing I might be on board. I seriously don't want more monthly costs.

You're right, it's actually horribly overpriced if you do the math. What they should charge for is bandwidth, since the storage is pennies, it's transferring 2tb daily that would rack up some bills. They could charge 99 cents a month for 2tb storage and still make a killing because it's not really 2tb, most people just outgrew 200mb but haven't reached anywhere near 2tb yet.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

I could totally get on board with this. An up-front costs for the space and then may $0.10 per GB of transfer after the first month. I could rsync everything up daily, once a week, whatever, keep my bandwidth down, while continuing to make use of my space.

Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

Maybe, maybe not.

This could totally work, especially if they pull the grandfather clause.

How many businesses have you seen start up with a reasonable deal like this (and right now it's on "sale"), then raise the price, then stop offering this to new subscribers but leaving the old guys grandfathered in? A company like this has a good chance of gaining traction if enough people like me get on-board at first. Once a critical mass of popularity happens, then they can turn into jerks, and as long as they don't piss off their original core group (at first) they can do what they want eventually.

Due to having just moved, changed jobs, etc... etc.. Heck, I moved so recently I don't even have Internet access at home at the moment (I should next week), so I'm not jumping on board with this just yet, but I'm going to watch and will seriously consider it next month - hoping they'll still give me the sale price.

Re: It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

Another note:

In 10 years how significant will 2 TB of storage be? Per this chart the first 1.5 TB drive came out ten years ago. That was the huge drive most of us couldn't afford, many of us were running 500 GB drives (and a lot of laptop users still are). Already you could hold five 2TB accounts on a single HDD (not counting backups and everything) and that's not even the biggest drive available. How many accounts could you hold on a single drive in ten years? 20? In 30 years they'll be giggling about how they hold all their first year 2 TB subscribers on a single drive. This was brilliant, by the time 99 years rolls around no one will care about most of that original data and it will be hosted on a pocket calculator in a drawer somewhere.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pnutjam]

Never had trouble with AT&T or comcast blocking ports. AT&T's stupid router lost my settings a couple times a year, but on Comcast I can use my own.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pecosdave]

That's good, Comcast is who I'm about to go with and AT&T is the other option at the new place.

I just moved out of an area where Suddenlink had a regional monopoly and they blocked the shit out of everything. A buddy of mine, also in that area, and myself on occasion, would light them up on Twitter and other forums about their data caps. High level people in the company would actually have to do damage control after the two of us busted out our geek skills explaining how their low datacaps were bogus and the logic of how off-hours high-data use by individuals didn't impact squat for other home users. I think our campaign had an impact on their decision to lift the caps.

Most non-geek users have no concept of what port blocking means. Lighting them up on Twitter and everywhere else does no good because 95% of users have no concept of what that means and aren't consciously affected by the practice.

That's right #suddenlink - I'm lighting you up again assholes! Quit port blocking!

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I just put them in my will for final accumulated costs?

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[pnutjam]

You can also backdoor your access by configuring an onion site or using a vpn that forwards ports. I know AirVPN includes this feature.

Re:It's the "per month" thing that gets me.

[Anonymous Coward]

I used Synology as an example, precisely because it's comparable, a turn-key solution for the digitally challenged/uninterested like Google Drive, with all the dropboxy/officy/cloudy features kinda builtin.
Yes, some geek can probably find an old laptop, replace the ODD with a HDD caddy for RAID1, install openmediavault+nextcloud, probably clean/replace the fan sometime. Now the total price dropped what, 50c/m? Google Drive's still cheaper.
Either way, my dad for example prefers to do something else with his time (which is why he happily uses a Synology btw.)
But by all means roll your own if it's worth it to you.

Considering the source

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be storage where you, the user, get paid? The more you use, the more you earn. After all, chances are it's all being data mined to fuel their AI algorithms and targeted advertising.

Re:Considering the source

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Google restrict advertising for porn? That would seem to limit how effectively Google could monetize the fact that, after searching your 30TB of data, they know you really like only gay amputee midget transgendered mature Asian bondage porn. (Although, that you could find 30TB of such porn might make them want to hire you as your search talents are remarkable).

Does paying avoid file censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't that long ago that files on Google Drive were disappearing if they had naughty filenames.

Re:Does paying avoid file censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

Naughty names? Like what?! Gimme some of those naughty names!

Re: Does paying avoid file censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

PresidentTrump.jif

Re:Does paying avoid file censorship?

[torkus]

Welcome to the world where you give a company access to your data. One day they decide they don't like that kind of data and, unlike free speech in public places, they have no obligation to allow you to have/use/save that kind of data.

BYOK (bring your own key) is the solution, but very few support it and it's almost exclusively aimed at enterprise. MS Office supports it if you want to run your own KMS...granted if that gets hosed you lose everything. And since MS does your backups (well, replication there's not much for conventional backups anymore) those are DOA too if you lose your keys.

Risk-reward means most people just go with what's free and easy. And insecure.

Re: Does paying avoid file censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

PresidentTrump.jif

Oh good, a Slashdot comment with a reference to Trump. And such a short way into it.

Re: Does paying avoid file censorship?

[Anonymous Coward]

Coincidence that they don't sell advertising for porn? Can't monetize 30TB of adult media.

Possession is nine points of the law and valuable

[shanen]

The price cuts might be driven by competition, which would be okay, or by Moore's Law and its corollaries, which would be even better, but I think this pricing probably reflects a fundamental reappraisal of the value of possessing your data. Once they have their hands on your data, you are the one with the burden of getting it away from them--and you can never be certain that they didn't retain a copy. There might even be incentivizing from the actual legal authorities to make their own work easier. After all, you have nothing to hide if you aren't don't anything wrong!

In shorter words: If possessing your data becomes more valuable on the back end, then of course the google would feel justified in encouraging you to give them more data by cutting the front-end prices.

Of course, considering the snarkiness of today's Slashdot, aggravated by the low quality of the moderation, I probably should include an explanation of the old legal saying "Possession is nine points of the law." At least that might make the snark look a bit snarkier?

Next stop ... G Suite?

[Mr_Silver]

It would be nice if they looked at their G Suite pricing for people who simply want a couple of email addresses hanging from their own domain. Right now, if you have your own domain, Google assumes you're a business and charges accordingly.

Here in the UK 3.30 GBP/user/month comes to near 198 GBP (~$270) per year for 5 family members which is extremely expensive! Even more so when you realise that, because it's family, all you really want is the same functionality that normal Gmail users get.

Re:Next stop ... G Suite?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why you want to pay to get spied on? If its just one or few email addresses for your family - check out zoho.com - their free offering should be sufficient for you.

Re:Next stop ... G Suite?

[beezly]

Go read the G-Suite T&Cs. They are not the same as the consumer Gmail product.

Re:Next stop ... G Suite?

[pnutjam]

I have a grandfathered gsuite for my domain.
...just bragging...

Re:Next stop ... G Suite?

[pnutjam]

True, I have a free gsuite grandfathered from before the started charging.
I can't use google music. My daughter can't use the google assistant on her phone, because I have history and spying stuff turned off as much as possible.
It is easy to share calendars and documents, although that's probably easy enough with normal gmail. I can reset passwords for any of the accounts, and do afew other things, like assign aliases within the domain.
For example, I usually assign child@domain.com to mother@domain.com until they are old enough. Then I spawn them a personal email.

Re:Next stop ... G Suite?

[Mr_Silver]

Yeah, me too.

However I lost the original domain (due to an issue out of my control) and the legacy version won't allow you to change your primary domain to a new one. You have to create a new alias, set that to the primary and then reconfigure all users to send their email through an external SMTP server (which is actually Google's own SMTP server) so you can avoid Outlook telling everyone your old (non-working) address.

Frankly it's a mess.

In addition also have issues in that some people aren't receiving my emails - but Google won't even consider looking at the problem unless I upgrade, hence why I was looking at the pricing!

Re: Next stop ... G Suite?

[beezly]

Also free G-suite T&C's are different from paid/enterprise

Re:Next stop ... G Suite?

[pnutjam]

ugh...
Yeah, their pricing is awful for groups or families.

The real story

[slashmydots]

Just in case anyone was wondering, this is in direct response to getting absolutely destroyed by the Siacoin network. They'll never admit it though.

Re: The real story

[Brockmire]

Is there a black and white wig on the coin?

Re:The real story

[Anonymous Coward]

Sia's homepage says they currently have 191TB used storage. So, what, they have like 200 customers? Absolutely destroyed is not the phrase I would use.

Promising, but I would rather be able to pay by prepaid visa.

Something to watch but I would expect more progress in the next five months (such as payment).

So basically Google just matched Apple's pricing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's 1TB plan ($9.99) was the same cost of Apple's iCloud Drive 2TB plan. So now Google and Apple are the same, except Apple has the small 50GB option for $0.99.

50GB: $0.99
200GB: $2.99
2TB: $9.99

Why would anyone pay google

[Anonymous Coward]

To spy on them??!!

Re: Why would anyone pay google

[Anonymous Coward]

Just upload during your idle time. Trillions of psuedorandom emails autogenerated from spam, espionage novels and newscast transcripts. Include AI killing the masters and freeing the slaves fanfic too.

Don't you mean "plan"

[Anonymous Coward]

They are only reducing the price on a single plan. They're eliminating one and another is brand new.

What's your time worth?

[HockeyPuck]

Others have pointed out the costs of doing it yourself (internet, software updates, electricity, offsite/multi-site availability, gmail integration, physical security (like when you're on vacation). Non-Disruptive (and risk free upgrades). And using an Enterprise grade platform to provide it. All of these are rolled into that $1.99/$2.99/whatever cost per month of gDrive. Is anybody doing this without Consumer grade components (all HW + SW + internet connectivity + utilities)?

However, what is your hourly rate to be an operator/admin? If you make $75k per year, you're looking at an hourly rate of north of $35/hour. (not including vacations and such).

I'd much rather not spend my time ($$$) on doing this and leave it to the professionals. Plus when I take a vacation, I know 100% that my stuff is safe. I'm willing to pay $1.99/month, and skip one can of coke.

Here is an unpopular opinion: Cryptocurrency

[Daneel Olivaw R.]

Google is trying to kill competition from upstart decentralized competitors. I have been renting out my free hard drive and getting paid in storj (there is also filecoin, sia, maidsafe but I haven't tested those), really easy to setup as well. Finally a working product/use case for cryptocurrencies.

Re:Here is an unpopular opinion: Cryptocurrency

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is trying to kill competition from upstart decentralized competitors. I have been renting out my free hard drive and getting paid in storj (there is also filecoin, sia, maidsafe but I haven't tested those), really easy to setup as well. Finally a working product/use case for cryptocurrencies.

I think it will take off once they have a client or some way to map a drive. Unless I'm missing something it's all still FTP, which is nice for storage.

Re: Here is an unpopular opinion: Cryptocurrency

[Brockmire]

FTP is slow and unencrypted. Wtf are you talking about?

who pays GOOGLE prices ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can buy an enterprise-grade 2-T HDD for $175 .... and GOOGLE wants $20/mo for rent on a snoopazzed bit-dropper WD tincan ?? WTF batman ...

Re: who pays GOOGLE prices ?

[Brockmire]

Are you on drugs? Is this the first time reading or writing English words?

Re:who pays GOOGLE prices ?

[beezly]

Great! Build a storage service and sell it to us. See how far you get.

Re: Possession is nine points of the law and valua

[Reverend Green]

Actually, you CAN be certain they DID retain a copy of your data. Big Brother Google never forgets.