Amazon eliminates free cloud storage

Amazon sent me this email last week:

“Thanks for being an Amazon Cloud Drive customer! Amazon Cloud Drive is introducing new unlimited storage plans.

You can now save all your photos in one place with the Unlimited Photos plan for $11.99/year, plus 5 GB for videos and files. Or, if you have more than photos that you need to keep safe, the Unlimited Everything plan is perfect for all your photos, video, files, and documents, for $59.99/year.”

Astute readers will note the free 5 GB plan has been eliminated. I have no sources on why Amazon did this — maybe people weren’t really using under 5 GB, but I wonder if this is due to e-book piracy. I do wonder if most of what people were using the Personal Documents for pirated ebooks and this is Amazon’s way of getting some money from this.

Either way, it sucks. I used to use Personal Documents to store PDFs of manuals. I’ll likely just toss them in iBooks now.

Author: Mark Crump

A long-time Mac user, Mark has been writing about technology in some form for over ten years. Mark enjoys his Kool-Aid shaken, not stirred. He also believes the "it just works" slogan from the ads should have an asterisk: except when it refuses to. You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/crumpy. His personal site is www.markcrump.com View all posts by Mark Crump