Amazon Cloud Drive goes unlimited: $11.99/year for photos and $59.99/year for everything
Amazon has announced two unlimited storage plans for its cloud-based storage service, Amazon Cloud Drive, which sees a massive price reduction for its giant hard-drive in the sky. — The plans focus on two specific scenarios.
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2015 Amazon repositioned Cloud Drive from a paid-per-gigabyte service into a flat-rate utility: $11.99 a year for unlimited photos, $59.99 for unlimited files of any type. The related coverage traces what happened next — the photo perk was extended to shared family accounts through the Households program that November, and the flat rate went international when the UK got unlimited storage for £55 a year in August 2016.
First-order effects
- Buyers get uncapped cloud storage at prices that ignore volume entirely — $11.99 a year for photos and $59.99 for all files — turning Cloud Drive into a mass-market default rather than a metered service.
- Unlimited photo storage becomes shareable: adding it to the Households program lets multiple family members draw on the same plan.
Second-order effects
- The flat-rate model scales geographically, with the UK receiving the same unlimited offer at £55 a year, establishing it as Amazon's standard international storage pitch.
- Heavy users can store far more than their fee covers, since costs rise with stored bytes while revenue stays fixed — an economic mismatch that builds pressure inside the product line itself.
Third-order effects
- By June 2017 Amazon abandons the experiment entirely, replacing unlimited plans with tiered caps of 100GB for $11.99 a year and 1TB for $60 — flat-rate consumer storage giving way to capacity-aware pricing.
- The endpoint is consolidation around purpose-built media storage: Amazon announces Drive will shut down at the end of 2023 to focus on photo and video storage via Amazon Photos, retiring the general-purpose drive altogether.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage moved from unlimited land-grab pricing back to capacity-aware tiers, and then consolidated around photo-specific services rather than general-purpose drives.