Google has cut the price plans for its Drive service dramatically, charging just a fifth of Dropbox’s prices for a monthly 100GB of data, as the internet giant gets serious about becoming the dominant player in the growing cloud storage market.
Now, Google Drive users will only have to pay $1.99 each month for 100 GB of cloud storage, $9.99 a month for 1 TB and $99.99 for a month for 10 TB. One year of 100 GB cloud storage on Google Drive only costs $23.88 a year.
The new subscription prices are significantly lower than those of their two main competitors Dropbox and Microsoft’s OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive).
A subscription to 100 GB of OneDrive cloud storage amounts to more than double the cost of Google Drive’s 100 GB plan, at $50 a year.
Dropbox currently charges $9.99 a month for 100 GB of cloud storage, which amounts to about $100 a year and $19.99 for 200 GB of storage each month, which adds up to almost $200 a year.
Other rivals SugarSync and iCloud also charge more. SugarSync offers one terabyte of data for $55 per month for up to three users. Apple asks for $100 per year (or $8.33 a month) for 50 GB of iCloud storage- meaning users can get twice the storage each month and pay a quarter of the price with Google Drive.
The drastic 80% price cut from Google has led many to speculate why the firm is doing this- potentially at a loss. A key reason is to simply price out competition in a market that it does not yet dominate, and also take a swipe at the business market where companies like Microsoft and Amazon’s industrial cloud storage solutions still thrive.