Google Fires Shots in Cloud Storage Wars

Google StorageYesterday, Google lowered the price of its cloud storage product, Google Drive. And by lowered, I mean changed the game.

Their new prices:

Space Monthly Cost
100GB $1.99
1TB $9.99
10TB $99.99
20TB $199.99
30TB $299.99

I would guess the vast majority of Google users don’t need the 20 or 30 TB option, but that 100GB for $2 USD a month is very, very compelling. That’s enough to back up video files, music, photos and much more.

Google has made cloud storage a commodity, and I’m sure companies like Dropbox, who I am a daily user of, are probably not very happy this morning. Through various promotions and referrals, I have 25GB of storage at Dropbox, of which I’m using about half. I like Dropbox because it just works. I save a file at work, I get home, it’s there. I open my phone, file is there.

But the biggest fear of any startup, I’m sure, is seeing one of the giants, such as Google, Amazon or Apple get into your space. Dropbox’s cost of $10 per month for 100GB suddenly seems very high. They’re built on Amazon’s S3 backend, and just can’t afford the scalability and just sheer giant size of computing power that Google has.

One competitor in this space that shouldn’t be ignored is Amazon’s Cloud Drive. They’ve got massive computing backend, that I too am a regular customer of. They offer a cloud drive product that’s compelling and promises a similar desktop/app/phone concept.

Let’s take a look at the cloud storage landscape, offerings and pricing. It should give you an idea of the shift that just happened.

Provider 2GB 5GB 10GB 15GB 20GB 50GB 100GB 1TB
Google Drive FREE $1.99 $9.99
Amazon Cloud Files FREE $0.83 $2.08 $4.16 $41.66
Dropbox FREE $9.99
Apple iCloud FREE $1.66 $3.33 $8.33
Box.net FREE $5.00 $15
Microsoft SkyDrive FREE $2.08 $4.16
SpiderOak FREE $10.00
SugarSync $7.49 $9.99 $55.00

It will be interesting to see who responds and how they respond, especially giants like Amazon and Microsoft.