[metadat]

$20/mo still isn't bad for unlimited storage. Do any other providers come close to this price point?

I wish I could prepay for the next 10 years to lock in at this price.

How much does a petabyte of redundant hard drive storage cost? Yeah.. will probably still be more than $2,500 USD in 10 years.

[esalman]

I don't think there's an option to even pay for one year right now. It at least was the case last year when they pulled the plug on free tier and I had reluctantly give them credit card information for essentially a one person company.

[joecool1029]

Workspace and Personal accounts use different payment systems. Last I checked the personal account storage payments were through Google Wallet.

For Workspace accounts there probably isn't an option for end-users to pay for a year ahead. For resellers like me, we used to get discounts a few years ago if we had clients go on annual contracts. They removed those discounts so we steered the majority of clients to flex plans.

If that wasn't enough of a motivation to go flex, whatever clown MBA's run this division of Google decided it would be fun to create a new certification system for resellers over the past couple years. We didn't complete the 12 hours or so of Powerpoints and exams so while I can provision new customers if I have an annual contracted customer smack the resource limits I can't actually upgrade their license unless I rage at Google Partner connect to override and do it for me. Leaving customers on flex gives us the ability to upgrade and downgrade at will. It's literally the only company I've ever dealt with that makes it this hard to upgrade to a higher paid contract, they just leave money on the table. There's absolutely no incentive for a small reseller like me to upsell an annual contract that chains my hands, this notice that the discounts are coming back is such a joke.

[IanCal]

They've just added an annual plan (announced in this post).

[shj2105]

It’s not unlimited storage though? It used to be but my understanding is that they started enforcing the storage limits late last year.

[trvz]

Unlimited storage is still available for subscriptions that have been kept active since it was officially a thing.

[metadat]

Hmm, unfortunate if they discontinued it. Maybe my account was grandfathered in.

[remus]

Not sure what subscription you're on but the highest tier still has "as much storage as you need" or similar wording. I assume they've moved away from the unlimited wording because it was abused.

[metadat]

Yes that's right, I'm on the "highest max plan", because it became necessary to keep the data flowing. Thanks for helping me remember.

R.I.P. $7/mo unlimited storage plan.

[flatiron]

I have 80TB on a $20 a month account. Hope they don’t either kick me off or bump it too much.

[metadat]

Word on the street is they offered it because their DCs are so overprovisioned on storage that it doesn't really matter. Time will reveal whether or not this is true.

As a sidenote, I'm disappointed by how slowly HDD capacity has been increasing the last few years.

100MB -> 1GB: 10x Was amazing

5GB -> 20GB: 4x Amazing

40GB -> 250GB: Hell yeah!

...

Nowadays the rate of increase is way down. 10TB -> 20TB: 0.5x meh. In the next 5 years we _might_ get a 30TB drive? Yawn.

[gowld]

Do you need a petabyte of storage?

[metadat]

I don't need anything, eventually I'll probably die.

In the meantime..