Amazon has opened a new front in its cloud pricing war by undercutting both Dropbox’s pricing and free storage options with its Cloud Drive consumer storage service.
Cloud Drive started life as a place for Amazon customers to store their MP3 files purchased through the company’s online retail site, but has since evolved into a more general online storage service.
Cloud Drive now offers 5GB of free storage, whereas Dropbox offers 2MB. For additional storage, Amazon charges £6 per year for 20GB of storage, £16 for 50GB, or £32 for 100GB.
These price points are significantly lower than Dropbox, which charges £6.56 per month for 100GB, equating to £78.72 per annum.
Amazon’s Cloud Drive offering is also more generous overall than Google and Microsoft's.
Cloud Drive is a little over £7 cheaper than Google Drive for 100GB of storage, and while its pricing up to 100GB is the same as Microsoft’s SkyDrive, Amazon plans to offer up to 1TB of storage, while SkyDrive tops out at 100GB.
Nevertheless, there are limitations to Cloud Drive, particularly when it comes to accessibility. Mobile support is limited to Kindle devices, with no app for iOS, Android or Windows Phone operating systems.
Additionally, despite its roots, you can no longer store music files on Cloud Drive and must instead use Amazon’s Cloud Player service.
Amazon has also reduced the request pricing for its S3 enterprise storage product. In the EU region, PUT, COP, POST and LIST requests cost $0.005 (£0.003) per 1000 requests.
Glacier archive and restore requests in the region are $0.055 (£0.036) per 1,000 requests, and GET and all other requests are $0.004 (£0.0026) per 10,000 requests, except Delete requests and Glacier data restore requests, which are free.
Both the newly updated Cloud Drive and the new S3 prices are available immediately.
