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Because it costs more than a few dollars a month. The net cost to users for Google is zero (or a token amount) because Google makes their money from data mining
by vidanay 6y ago
Because it costs more than a few dollars a month. The net cost to users for Google is zero (or a token amount) because Google makes their money from data mining and selling your meta data.
- actuator 6y agoEmail addresses and inboxes are important to people. They are critical to our online identity. Wiki mentions Gmail having 1.5 billion users. Imagine even 100M of them paying $100 per year. Makes Gmail a $10B product just on paid subscriptions, that is not a small amount.
- 01100011 6y agoAmazon cloud storage is $1.99/mo for 100GB. That's exactly what I get from Google(I pay $1.99 for extra storage). Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month?
- m00x 6y ago> Are you saying the software to perform the syncing costs more than a few dollars per month? The operational costs could be more than that per user if you want regular updates. That's disregarding engineering time.
- unionpivo 6y agoYou need stable business with at least few people employed, to make sure the lights don't go out, and that people fix issues when they come up. Storage cost is probably only small part of the price. You also don't want it to be VC backed because such businesses will not be worth billions. (and if it will try to become such you will have similar problems as google)
- manigandham 6y agoFor a competing service maybe, but they're talking about backups. I find the bigger issue is that not enough people believe they need a backup for the "cloud".