[wspeirs]

It's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much:

- Box: $180/year for unlimited (https://www.box.com/pricing/)

- Google: $120/year for 1TB (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en)

- Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB (https://www.dropbox.com/pro)

- Amazon: $60/year for unlimited (https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/landing/everything/)

- Microsoft: $60/year for 1TB (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-office-36...)

They all offer approximately the same service, but from cheapest to priciest is almost 3x. I wonder how much sand is left in the hourglass for companies like Box & Dropbox? Also, how much longer will Google keep their price at $120/year for 1TB when Amazon is half that for unlimited storage? Also, does your average Joe even care when you get 15GB for free from Google?

[Veratyr]

You used business pricing for Box, Dropbox and Microsoft but consumer pricing for Google. Google gives unlimited storage for $120/user/year as part of Apps for Work Unlimited: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782?hl=en

Also "offer approximately the same service" is a bit off. Amazon doesn't have any kind of SLA for Cloud Drive and while Box, Microsoft and Google provide SLAs. In addition, while the older competitors provide essentially a full office suite and a bunch of features like OCR, Amazon provides nothing but a very basic web interface that allows you to see previews.

[rpearl]

That's Dropbox's consumer pricing. Their business pricing is $180/user/year ($15/user/mo) for unlimited.

https://www.dropbox.com/business/pricing

(nb: used to work there)

[fizzbatter]

re:GoogleUnlimited, That's really interesting. Are you aware of any downside? Ie, Why a user might choose Google's normal $120/y over Google Apps Unlimited?

[Veratyr]

Consumer accounts have more complete access to Google products. For example there's currently no way to get a Project Fi number on an Apps for Work account.

Also the business plans are theoretically limited to 1TB per users for organizations with less than 5 users. I'm not sure if that's still the case since I seem to have actual unlimited (2TB use now) with a single user organization.

[sbronstein]

There is a 5 user minimum for Google Apps for Work Unlimited.

[agildehaus]

Absolutely none of these are "unlimited" storage. It's simply overselling.

Even the providers that are selling N terabytes for $Q are counting on a certain percentage of those users not utilizing that much. This is why the prices vary so wildly, because each provider is doing different math and hedging different bets.

[kordless]

> hedging different bets

More specifically, they each have their own unique business model which they believe will perform best in the market. You can "oversell" future storage successfully if you know the usage growth rates.

[gist]

No doubt also different things for each hidden in the TOS. This same thing happens with "unlimited" web hosting providers (godaddy in particular).

[msh]

The problem with amazon cloud drive is that they dont offer a synt client like the rest.

So no desktop sync, only manual uploads and downloads.

[amalag]

Yeah the clients are pretty bad. They do have a synology sync tool which is good, otherwise I did it manually for our photos since Adobe lightroom can organize folders nicely

[vagelim]

What do you mean? (removed link)

[CharlesW]

Amazon's desktop app supports batch uploads and downloads, but not sync to/from Amazon Cloud Drive.

However, there are 3rd-party options for this:

• Arq: https://www.arqbackup.com/

• odrive: https://www.odrive.com/amazon

• Synology Cloud Sync: http://www.macdrifter.com/2015/06/synology-cloud-sync-adds-a...

[natch]

Warning, drive-by download link in parent.

[cmurf]

The Amazon pricing is sufficiently cheap it probably comes with caveats similar to Glacier. Rather than as convoluted as Glacier they probably just have fixed retrieval amounts and rates, rather than the "get more or faster, pay more" Glacier sliding scale. Whereas Google is probably their nearline service. I have no idea what Microsoft's is. Backblaze also has $0.005/GB/mo which puts it in the $60/year for 1TB range using B2 Cloud service, but it's more like Google Nearline I think.

All of these have different retrieval rules and rates, so it's not just the annual.

[Veratyr]

Many home users have managed to saturate their (unusually fast) connections sending/receiving to Amazon Cloud Drive: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/32oniv/so_how_...

And it doesn't have Glacier-like restrictions, at least in terms of retrieval delay. Nor does Backblaze. The difference with Backblaze is that it's only replicated within a single datacenter. If anything happens to that DC you're out of luck.

[mahyarm]

The typical pattern for photo users will be a large amount of upload at the start as they upload their collection, then occasional browsing of photos on the amazon website, which will be mostly smaller thumbnails. Rarely once in awhile users will request large originals. You will have an even smaller amount of people download their entire collection of originals.

With these patterns, you can make a system that puts everything on S3 at first, makes thumbnails and starts moving most things to glacier based on access patterns.

[Veratyr]

Such a system would be wonderful, particularly if it used Backblaze B2 or Google Nearline instead of Glacier (to get around the hours of delay).

Unfortunately, no such system yet exists and the complexities of dealing with many people's libraries (particularly regarding RAW files) make it more difficult than it seems (I've looked at doing this myself in the past).

[jahnu]

So annoying that Amazon unlimited is only available in the US.

[msh]

Is it not prime you are thinking about?

I am pretty sure cloud drive is available outside the US.

[fibo]

What a pity

[javajosh]

>does your average Joe even care when you get 15GB for free from Google?

Not sure what you mean there, but for me, 15G is plenty (but then, it's mostly just going to email storage).

[wpietri]

Personally, I'm happy to keep paying Dropbox. The Amazon and Google offerings aren't so much commercial products as hegemony extensions. When something's a sideline, I think there's a much higher risk of a mediocre product (e.g., Google Plus) or that eventually gets killed because strategery (e.g., Google Reader).

I'm ok with that for things I don't care too much about losing, but my photos are precious to me, so I'll keep them with a company whose main business is not losing my stuff. Dropbox has one job, and so far they have consistently acted like they know it.

[CydeWeys]

Google Photos is really good at viewing/galleries/sharing and indexing, and especially so at applying machine intelligence for categorization and tagging. How well does Dropbox handle this stuff?

[legulere]

Also iCloud 120 $ per year for 1 TB. The pattern I see is that successful companies that already have their product out there charge more: Google has a big install base of Android phones and the Chrome browser. Apple has a big install base of iOS devices and Macs. Dropbox is also really popular. Microsoft on the other hand mostly has legacy installations on the desktop and a tiny share of the mobile market - even less so if you look at typical power users that use products like these. Amazon is the total newcomer.

So I guess both try to attract pro users with low cost.

[copperx]

Do any of these companies provide an official Linux client?

[msh]

Dropbox does.