Google has slashed the price of some Drive plans, as it battles Microsoft, Dropbox, Box and others in the red-hot cloud storage market.
Google still offers 15GB of Drive storage free with a Google account, but it cut the monthly price of the 100GB plan from US$4.99 to $1.99 and the 1TB plan from $49.99 to $9.99.
The company was able to cut the plans’ prices thanks to “recent infrastructure improvements,” said Scott Johnston, director of product management, in a blog post Thursday.
Now that 1TB of Drive storage costs radically less, more people are bound to consider it, so Johnston offered them some perspective about use cases for the plan. “How big is a terabyte anyway? Well, that’s enough storage for you to take a selfie twice a day for the next 200 years and still have room left over for… shall we say… less important things,” he wrote, influenced possibly by his company’s Calico project, whose goal is to radically extend human life.
Google also introduced new Drive plans with 10TB of storage for $99.99 per month, 20TB for $199.99 per month and 30TB for $299.99 per month.
Google will automatically adjust the accounts of existing subscribers to the plans whose prices were cut.
The price cuts apply only to individual Google accounts for consumers and not to Google Apps customers.
Google Apps for Business and Google Apps for Education subscriptions include 30GB of Drive storage per user, and domain administrators can purchase more space if necessary, but the plans and prices vary from the ones for individuals.