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Amazon has killed off its unlimited data storage deal

Amazon has killed off its unlimited data storage deal

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Time to check you don’t have auto-renew turned on

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Amazon has killed off its generous unlimited cloud storage deal for Amazon Drive. Previously, customers could store as much data as they liked on Amazon’s servers for just $60 a year (or $12 a year for just unlimited photos). Now, the company offers just two tiers: store up to 100GB for $11.99 a year, or up to 1TB for $60. It costs an extra $60 a year for each terabyte on top of this, with a top limit of 30 terabytes.

The changes kick in today, although anyone already signed up for unlimited storage will keep the offer until it expires. If they have auto-renew turned on, they’ll be automatically changed to the $60 / year plan when their first year ends. Some good news: anyone signed up for Amazon Prime will still get unlimited photo storage as part of their membership, and anyone who signs up for Amazon Drive will also get 5GB for free.

Killing off unlimited storage isn’t a surprising move from Amazon. The company introduced the deal back in 2015 as part of a campaign against rival cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive. But these sorts of offers are only really good for getting customers in the door — they’re not sustainable. Microsoft went through a similar process with unlimited OneDrive storage: introducing it in October 2014 for Office 365 subscribers, then reducing it to a 1TB limit in November 2015.

Amazon says users taking advantage of the unlimited storage deal who don’t want to start paying for one of the new plans will have 180 days to download or delete their data. After that grace period, Amazon will start deleting content for them (starting with most recent uploads) until the account falls within the new limits.