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Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
by michaelbuckbee 6mo ago
Is there an example of a consumer facing SaaS that's been able to handle the "unlimited" in a way you'd consider positive?
- Aerroon 6mo agoGoogle and Youtube, especially Youtube.
- Chaosvex 6mo agoYouTube is constantly reencoding videos to save space at the expense of older content looking like mud, so arguably even they're having their struggles.
- UltraSane 6mo agoYouTube shorts are incredibly highly compressed.
- bombcar 6mo agoWe all know the "nobody has watched this video in ten years, login at least once or it'll be yeeted" email is coming, someday.
- computably 6mo agoYT would have to start declining in growth pretty substantially for that to be the case. All the 360p video from 2010-2015 probably doesn't take up even 1% of the storage new videos added in 2025.
- bombcar 6mo agoTrue, it's more likely to be aimed at stemming the tide of 4k video that nobody watches - but luckily they're worth more than Disney right now so we don't have to confront that ... yet.
- tedivm 6mo agoGoogle does not have unlimited. I had to pay to increase my storage.
- samfriedman 6mo agoGoogle Drive reneged on unlimited storage for Education accounts once they realized that universities also contain researchers who need to store huge amounts of data.
- Barbing 6mo agoMassive fraud from abroad didn't help there either. A favorite backup spot for terabytes of pirated media, complete with guides on which schools had good @edu addresses for it. Hadn't even considered your obvious point, a good one!
- Dylan16807 6mo agoNot only did they cut unlimited, they went to insultingly low limits with not much warning after all their nice promises. Moderately large universities ended up with less space per student than the 15GB they give out to anyone for free. It was a pretty bad rug pull.
- ValentineC 6mo agoGoogle forced everyone off their deprecated G Suite for Business plan (which had unlimited storage) and onto a Workspace plan. I had to give up and delete plenty of data because of this. That data was important to me, but not important enough to pay their ransom.
- Spooky23 6mo agoYou can only do it during growth phases or if there’s complimentary products with margin. The story I was told about Office 365 was the when they were using spinning disk, exchange was IOPS-bound, so they had lots of high volume, low iops storage to offer for SharePoint. Google has a similar story, although neither are really unlimited, but approaching unlimited with for large customers. Once growth slows, churn eats much of the organic growth and you need to spend money on marketing.
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo agoTelegram?
- ethbr1 6mo agoUS cellular data plans? Where it's throttled after soft cap? Although I will say it's been nice to have them give more transparency around their actual soft cap numbers.
- bombcar 6mo agoThat’s an example of where unlimited can work (because the limit is a number of hours of degraded service which is quantifiable). Storage was already a hairy beast with the original setup, and it would be much better if they had defined limits you could at least know about (and pay for).