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I do wonder when people will cease to be willing to pay the "tax" on storage upgrades when it comes to "first party" cloud. With the general push (at least in
by g_p 5y ago
I do wonder when people will cease to be willing to pay the "tax" on storage upgrades when it comes to "first party" cloud.
With the general push (at least in Europe) among regulators to decouple (see investigations around app stores, bundled default apps, payment services on stores), I wonder if this model will fall apart some day. The "free" iCloud and Google storage tiers seem to have stagnated, whereas the cost of storage falls.
While you can't do everything supported by first-party iCloud storage (specifically iCloud backups for one example), the files app and support for storage by API ought to provide some competition for these overpriced first party storage options. If regulators force unbundling, we could see a separate ecosystem of storage from apps/services.
Maybe this would help drive more transparency of the true costs of the products and services in question, by decoupling them from "pay us 20x market rate for more storage, since you can't use any other storage with our app".
- evercast 5y agoiCloud and Google storage plans are overpriced? I have always thought they are cheap storage plans. 50GB of iCloud costs $0.99 per month. 2TB costs $10 which is similar to other solutions such as Dropbox or OneDrive.
- shaky-carrousel 5y agoThat's $5 per TB. In Hetzner I can rent a 5TB storage box for $11.32, that's $2.27 per TB.
- sofixa 5y agoBut that Hetzner storage box isn't redundant, doesn't do revisions, automatic sync and backups, etc. without some time spent on it.
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoYet someone could provide all of that for _everyone_ for literal 0-cost, and probably an actual ISP would provide at least some written guarantees on the redundancy of your data. The business model of all these companies is to tie their software to their expensive storage.
- sofixa 5y agoBut it's not 0 cost. You need storage redundancy, backups, software updates. Those things cost time.
- shaky-carrousel 5y agoYes, it does. It has automatic snapshots, up to ten. Google doesn't have that, if I delete a file from the trash is gone forever.
- MattGaiser 5y agoI pay a buck something for 50 GB of iCloud. Is there really someone selling 50GB for less than that?
- AshamedCaptain 5y agoiCloud pricing is designed to inflict the most amount of pain. The free tier is useless because it will not even backup a single iPhone, not even the cheapest offers. The 50GB tier is useless because it will not even backup a single _full_ iPhone, much less one of the higher capacity ones, and even if you avoid backing up (which kind of defeats the purpose of iCloud in the first place), 50GB is still a ridiculous amount. And so you are forced to move to the next iCloud tier ... which is expensive as hell compared to others.
- fomine3 5y agoiOS and apps (that don't consume your iCloud capacity) would use about 10-20GiB on 64GB(actually 59.6GiB) iPhone, so it can be backed up.