14 DAY TRIAL // Amazon is changing things up for its Drive customers, with the biggest news being that the unlimited cloud storage deal is gone.
Up until now, customers were allowed to store as much data as they wanted on Amazon's servers for a mere $60 per year, although there was also the option of paying just $12 for unlimited photos.
Now, the company has announced there will be two tiers. For $12 a year, you'll be able to store up to 100 GB, while $60 will get you up to 1TB of storage space. Each extra terabyte will cost customers an extra $60 per year, although there's a maximum of 30 terabytes that the company permits for any account.
The changes are kicking in right now, so if you've already signed up for unlimited storage, you get to keep it until it expires. If you have the automated renewal feature turned on, you'll be charged $60 per year when the plan ends.
There's time to download your data
Those who don't want to continue with this particular plan, they'll have 180 days to download or delete their data before Amazon starts deleting content for them.
The company does have some good news, however. If you've signed up for Amazon Prime, you'll get unlimited photo storage as part of your membership, something that wasn't included before. Also, signing up for Amazon Drive will bring you 5GB of free storage space.
While Amazon's decision to nix the unlimited storage plan might be disappointing for many, it can't really come as a surprise. The feature came as a way for Amazon to compete with Dropbox and Google Drive and other similar tools out there. In the long run, however, they're not sustainable and many other companies have set up limitations a while after introducing this type of data plans.