Amazon ends its unlimited data storage plan for Amazon Drive, now offers up to 100GB for $11.99 a year or up to 1TB for $60
Time to check you don't have auto-renew turned on — Amazon has killed off its generous unlimited cloud storage deal for Amazon Drive.
Context & Ripple Effects
Amazon launched its unlimited tier in March 2015 as an aggressive land-grab — $11.99/year for photos and $59.99/year for everything else ([[a:827652]]) — undercutting the entire consumer storage market. Killing it two years later reverses that bet and aligns Amazon with the pattern Microsoft set when it killed unlimited OneDrive storage in late 2015.
The move matters because it marks the end of the unlimited-storage era among major US providers: Dropbox would later cap its own 'all the space you need' plan at 5TB after abuse via pooling and reselling ([[a:843527]]), and Amazon itself ultimately decided to shut Drive down entirely by end of 2023 to focus on Amazon Photos ([[a:981337]]) — making this 2017 repricing the first step in that unwind.
First-order effects
- Existing unlimited subscribers lose their plan and must migrate to the new tiers — 100GB for $11.99/year or 1TB for $60 — with heavy users facing a steep effective price increase unless they prune their libraries.
Second-order effects
- Subscribers priced out of Amazon Drive become acquisition targets for Google, Apple, and Dropbox, whose paid tiers now compete on features rather than being undercut by Amazon's loss-leader pricing.
Third-order effects
- With Amazon, Microsoft, and Dropbox all having retreated from unlimited plans, flat-rate all-you-can-store pricing proves structurally unsustainable against hoarding and abuse, pushing the whole consumer market toward capacity-tiered pricing — a shift that ends with Amazon abandoning general-purpose Drive altogether in favor of photo-centric storage.
The trend: Consumer cloud storage is converging on capacity-aware tiered pricing as every major provider abandons unlimited plans that attracted hoarders and unprofitable usage.