Google rolls out unified paid-for storage

People who are running out of storage on Gmail can now pay Google for additional capacity. Annual fees range from $20 for 6 Gb to $500 for 250 Gb, offered as a selection of four capacity choices. Currently, Gmail offers 2.8 Gb storage with every free account and 10 Gb storage with every paid-for business account.

When you buy extra gigabytes the capacity applies to both Gmail and Picasa photo albums. Later on we should expect to see Google Docs & Spreadsheets included in the same storage scheme. As integration between Google's services gets better (e.g. opening a Gmail attachment in Google Docs), offering unified storage capacity across all services makes a lot of sense.

The market leader in storage, Amazon's S3, offers a more flexible service where you are only charged for storage actually used (at $0.15 per Gb per month) with no requirement to decide on capacity or plans up front. Amazon also charges for traffic although the cost is only significant when massive amounts of data is transfered.

I had previously (wrongly) predicted that consumer email would offer unlimited free storage. Google's move suggests that email is no longer seen as the competitive frontier it once was; instead the applications arena is where competition is rife. It also means that the company protects itself from the hassle of policing fair use agreements while getting a (probably insignificant) revenue stream out of their previously free services. Most importantly, for users of Google's services it means that the risk of running out of space has just become a lot less likely and so a potential barrier to adoption has been minimised.

Tags: Google email Gmail storage capacity Amazon S3 Googlemail Google Apps

Comments

[Gubatron]

$250 for only 100Gb a year?????

It probably makes sense to their finance people, Gmail has millions of users, only a small percentage, say a 1% to 3% willing to pay for this, will mean a lot of money to google, but do they really need to be charging for this space when they make 3 times more money than Yahoo! ?

Oh, and check out those $100 500Gb Hardrives on NewEgg dot com... with that amount of money you can buy 1.5 Terabytes every year.

[Bloopean]

Google makes a mistake, how can they do this when there's sites like MyBloop.com offering free storage?

Too pricey. Wonder if they're just looking for some fuzz and media talking about this next week.