Storage is far cheaper than most providers charge for it. Especially for things like photo libraries where the high res originals can probably be written to

Storage is far cheaper than most providers charge for it. Especially for things like photo libraries where the high res originals can probably be written to 1.1 hard drives in a basement somewhere (or maybe even tape) at a cost of <1 cent per GB/month. However, the storage also pays for the engineering costs of building the product, and the economics of that tends to work out far better with billions of users than with thousands of users.