SAN FRANCISCO, March 14 — The search giant’s decision could lead to a price war as its new rates significantly undercut those of closest direct rival Dropbox.
The cuts are huge and mean that 100GB of cloud storage now only costs US$1.99 (RM6.53) a month, down from US$4.99 a month and a whole Terabyte of space is yours for a monthly subscription of US$9.99 — it was $49.99. There’s even a US$99.99 a month price plan for 10TB of space.
Dropbox on the other hand currently charges a monthly fee of US$8.25 for 100GB, US$16.60 for a 200GB account and US$41.60 for 500GB of storage.
One of the things that has helped Dropbox become so successful and so popular so quickly is that it is platform agnostic with apps for iOS and Android as well as desktop and of course, it’s simple to use. The fact that the first 2GB of storage are free has also helped the company to attract consumers.
However, Google Drive comes with the first 15GB free of charge and works seamlessly across the company’s other web services such as its Drive productivity apps, Gmail and Google+ photos, making it an obvious choice for Android device users who want to keep things like photos and music off their handsets and that want access to documents on the go.
And the more consumers’ daily lives become mobile, the more cloud storage services are going to start to appeal. It will be interesting to see how Dropbox and other services like Microsoft One Drive respond. — AFP-Relaxnews
