Amazon Drive Stops Offering Unlimited Storage…

Amazon Drive is Amazon’s solution to offering secure cloud storage for all your files while making them accessible across any of the devices you own. If you are a Prime member or own a Kindle Fire, then Amazon provides free and unlimited photo storage. Until yesterday, you could also pay for an unlimited storage plan, but that is no longer the case.

The Amazon Drive FAQ received an update to reflect the fact Amazon is no longer offering unlimited storage plans. From today, two storage plans will be offered: 100GB for $11.99 per year and 1TB for $59.99 per year. Every additional terabyte of storage beyond that will cost an extra $59.99 up to a maximum of 30TB.

To put this in context, yesterday using 30TB of storage on Amazon Drive would cost you $59.99 per year. Today it will cost you $1,799.70 per year. It’s very unlikely any Amazon Drive subscriber will ever get near 30TB of files stored considering the restrictions Amazon has in place for these “private use” accounts. However, I’m sure many will approach, or have already gone past the 1TB storage limit, which effectively doubles the cost to buy another 1TB of space and continue using the service.

For existing Drive subscribers, there’s an important auto-renew quirk to take note of. When your subscription ends, if you have auto-renew turned on and less than 1TB of data stored, Amazon will renew your account at the 1TB tier for $59.99. This will happen even if you have less than 100GB stored, which means you could/should only be paying $11.99. The best way to stop that happening is to visit the Manage Storage page, check how much data you are using, and consider turning off auto-renew or ensuring your plan is set to the 100GB tier.

Signing up for Amazon Drive gets you 5GB of storage for free and Prime members will continue to receive free and unlimited photo storage. If you don’t like this change to the storage limits then Amazon offers a 180-day grace period once a storage subscription expires so you can decide what to do with your data.

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