Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing | Hacker News Reader

Google Photos hooked users with free unlimited storage. Now that's changing

keyt.com

233 pointsblindm250 comments

Discussion from a couple of days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25060973

> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”

Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I saythat with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions

To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable. I pay £2.50/month for 200gb of storage which more than covers my lifetimes worth of photos so far (in full res with a fair few RAW photos in there too).

And they're not deleting any photos that users already uploaded. I think Google deserve all the criticism they get for shutting down services. But this one seems to have been handled quite well.

Well it is like an infinite order of magnitude of a difference when PROMISED otherwise.

For most people, 15GB can very well be a lifetime.

There is the letter and there is the spirit, though.

Not even close with social media, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.

This does not sound true at all. Everyone has a camera and most everyone takes a lot of photos. A large number of people take videos too. I would be shocked if the median smartphone user didn’t take at least 5 GB of photo/video every year.

That’s like 5000 photos with today’s resolutions. Many people go through that in a year or two.

Source: Anecdata

15 GB/30,000 days ≈ ½ MB/day. You can’t type that, but that would be a single photo every week or so, or about 4,000 over a lifetime. Doable, but it would require quite a few habitual changes for most.

If that was true they would not have made the change as the marketing value of "unlimited" would have more than paid for the few users that did exceed.

However they know, as with all data things, that people will continually expand their consumption, with more and more mobile devices making not only extremely hi res photos but now 4K video, the need for storage will only increase

This type of comment is on the same vein of "640K ought to be enough for anybody." or "we will never need more than 4,294,967,296 addresses"

While technically true this also applies to literally any product marketed as unlimited, lifetime, or infinite. There are always restrictions because the world is finite and the resources of a single company even more limited. I would agree with you if you suggested that such marketing should be banned, but this is hardly a google-specific problem.

That’s similar to what Microsoft (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa...) and Apple (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201238; for fun/education, check the pricing in Colombia. I had to google to find the explanation for that) charge.

I also think syncing to one of those is the best solution for most consumers, even though its not a true backup and it runs the risk of account closure for uploading forbidden content.

> To be fair, Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable

That probably depends, on whether you factor in the profit Google makes from mining your data. That should be subtracted from their operating costs and only then compared to what they charge for the storage. My guess is that they'll make quite a killing on the thing, as a whole.

Even besides the morally questionable aspects (of the data mining), considering their position and leverage they might very well be slapped with some anti-trust rulings in the future.

Unlikely to happen in the US, since the meaning of anti-trust there has been systematically eroded and limited to where it has become all but a complete farce (compared to its original meaning/intentions). However, that's what you get when large corporations can pump vast amounts of money into politics, as if they were a voting citizen. But there is still some hope in other places. Either way, it shouldn't take rocket science to see how Google has a tremendous (unfair) advantage over any competition in this regard (which is what anti-trust really is about; not just avoiding/regulating absolute monopolies).

Is google mining photos for profit?

What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

Very little. I think training data for image classification is one benefit.

Google conspiracy theories are just HN's preferred sport.

... says the person hiding behind a throw-away account

Data for training neural networks?

Is unlabeled data even useful for that purpose?

Unsupervised learning can identify all the distinct people (and animals) in every photo you've taken. Then they ask you "who is this"?

1 picture is worth a 1000 google adwords

I would be very surprised if Google is not data mining everything they can, it's always been their main business model.

With the photos it could be as simple as merging the meta data from those photos together with a user profile for even more targeted advertising.

Somebody making a lot of photos of certain things might be more interested in buying these things.

I'm pretty sure the real data wizards can think of quite a few more, and better, ways to monetize such data, particularly at the scale that Google is collecting it.

I believe they can't do that without explicitly stating such usage of data in terms of service.

Very well paid teams of lawyers have spent considerable time and effort writing these terms of services. In the case of Google there is so much of this stuff, for all the different services, that Google doesn't even have a single conclusive ToS document, but instead a whole website [0]

Good luck finding anything explicitly stated in there.

[0] https://policies.google.com/terms

> What kind of profits are there to mine data in google photos?

Are you asking why data is valuable or what data can be found in photos? They could pour over every detail captured on camera taking note of locations, any products seen the background of your shots, the types of clothes you and your family/friends wear, who wears or doesn't wear makeup, etc) then they can use facial recognition to identify everyone in your pictures (photographed intentionally or not) and determine their relationships to you and each other then update everyone's dossiers with whatever new information they managed to gather from your pics.

Or they could just jerk off to your nudes. Who knows.

Google Photos could track a persons travel and dining and things we are fond of. Google Pay could track which friends we pay money to and where we hang out. An tourism council could target drinking buddies of somebody who visited there.

Facial recognition for who else is in the picture. They've never had a good social graph like Facebook. This is one way to construct one.

Alphagoog is an advertising company. Everything they do is focused on efficient selling of advertising. They will perform any surveillance they can in order to improve the profile they have of you, regardless of your status as a registered user of their services.

From photos you can find every person you (in person) know, everywhere you've gone, everything you do, everything you own (and don't). So long as it shows up in a picture once. If storage for 200gb costs _them_ a couple bucks, and that's the price of a few ad (conversions), it would seem to work out. I'm an outsider of course, would be interesting to understand the actual economics from someone more familiar with the details. Of course, if the story were this rosy they obviously wouldn't be charging. So I'm sure its quite a bit more nuanced than this.

Most will agree that the offer is reasonable. But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that (not because you have to, but because you change your mind)?

I feel like it should not, because the competitive advantage you get by offering things for free is incredibly huge. Whenever that gets a business to a place where people will be very unhappy to leave the service, you are in effect forcing people pay a price they have not agreed upon when they started using the service – be it the subscription fee or the price of forced migration.

It is very hard to put a price on breaking a promise like this, and since it's so hard to grasp, it can easily seem overblown, but millions of people and their decisions on very much related issue (deciding between an Android mobile vs an iPhone) were affected. It's not a matter of a startup trying and failing to be profitable, and either going bankrupt or being able to continue to provide a service. It's simply a giant optimizing for front-loaded profit. In my mind, Google does not deserve any leeway on this.

Such a law would basically make startups impossible. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, I think the startup culture is pretty toxic. Just an interesting result.

With one hand it would eliminate the opportunity to bait and switch, with the other it would extend a supply of users who weren't busy feasting on someone else's bait.

The real question is whether you could legislate and enforce such a law in a manner that couldn't be circumvented with simple accounting tricks.

It seems to me, markets have short term memory because markets are composed of people who also have short term memory. Bait and switch seems to be a quite effective market capture mechanism. Bait with something alluring at a loss, build momentum, then pull away once little could stop that momentum. Along the way, build in hurdles that make it difficult to transition away from the service through technical and other commitment hurdles.

Rinse repeat and as long as you have a decent product and enough capital to front-load the model and take initial loses, you seem to win everytime going forward. At this point, people even shun phrases like "vendor lock-in" like an external business dependency isn't a potential liability.

> But is that good enough, in this case? Should it be legal to front-load your business by promising something, and then going back on that

Did the user agreement - or even the marketing - at the time this was offered stipulate that unlimited photo storage would continue forever? As a user I never interpreted it that way - there's no free lunch.

You can get your photos out onto your own hardware using Google Takeout easily enough.

Google's pricing on storage is more than reasonable FOR NOW!

30 GBP per year for measly 200GB, I can have 1TB for 40 GBP (and I am talking about more expensive external drive) and I am not scaling it like Google

so no, that's not reasonable at all to pay 4-5 times more for online access to something you can have in safety of your home and actually own and if you keep using the drive for 2-3 years the comparison makes it even much worse deal for Google, after 3 years you are on 90GBP compared to 40GBP for 1TB hard drive, only 11 times more and you still own no hardware, what a great deal!

if you intend to pay as much you might as well buy sinology and have your own cloud through the app in your home without anyone harvesting your data

Apples to Oranges. Google replicate and have roughly ~ 3 copies of your data, your 1TB hard drive does no such thing, has zero redundancy, isn't available from your phone, can't automatically backup photos from it, etc.

except only reason many if not most of the people keep using google photos is free unlimited photo backup, let's see how many people keep using it when they run out of those 15GB

you can have redundancy with two drives for price which will pay itself within less than two years and you will have significatntly bigger backup capacity for connecting external harddrive directly to your phone through USB OTG and pressing one button, I find that extremely convenient, after all automatic google backup was pretty fucked up and freezing and unstable for years

what is the most important is you have your data backed up and it does not matter whether you have to connect drive and press one button or it us supposedly done automatically

This is much better stepped pricing than Dropbox'

Is this not a commonality between most "tech companies". The combination of tech, moving fast, disruption, etc, means that there's a lot of promises that drop once reality hits.

They probably meant the lifetime of the google service.

So anywhere from 15 minutes to two years.

Almost. I'd say they meant, "the lifetime of this version of the terms of service of the Google service."

You could argue that all hyper growth “build it and they will come” types of companies do this bait and switch. It’s inherent to the startup culture that emphasizes capturing users above earning profit in the early stages of a company.

Think about how many VC-backed companies offer services at discounted rates today in hopes of being able charge higher rates for that service in the future. This is endemic to tech generally, not just Google.

That isn't just a tech thing either. Look at "new and improved formulas" or other companies which after they develop a good reputation piss it away cutting corners.

Google has the ultimate smartass retort to justify it to critics especially if they are on Capital Hill. "I thought it was considered unfair competition now to provide something others can't now because we are apparently 'too big' now."

> Look at "new and improved formulas" or other companies which after they develop a good reputation piss it away cutting corners.

MBAs have "optimized" the flavor out of everything with their little spreadsheets and graphs and quarterly earnings reports. I can't go to a chain restaurant anymore.

Not even "able charge higher rates for that service in the future", equally good is just bought out and shut down.

The obvious solution is grandfathering. Google Photos decided to grandfather old photos: only photos uploaded after June 2021 count towards your storage limit. That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.

This is how most companies operate. For example I'm on a mobile plan that's better than anything currently offered by the provider. They don't force me to switch or change the plan I'm on, they just don't allow anyone to switch to that plan.

Considering the market penetration of Google Photos and the lack of any compelling reason to switch, I doubt that grandfathering would have accomplished what they're trying to do here. Phone companies also eventually kick people off of grandfathered plans, or change them so substantially that they are no longer recognizable. For example, I remember the AT&T unlimited plan that came in the early days of the iPhone. It started out reasonably cheap but eventually became extremely expensive.

> That's nice, but the obvious solution to prevent all this outrage would have been to grandfather in old user accounts: anyone already using Google Photos has no storage limit for compressed images (as before), but new accounts have the new limits. That allows for fast growth with insane offers at the start of the product cycle, while switching to a more profitable model for later users.

The fact that Google didn't do it is another reason why one could call it a bait-n-switch model.

Google 'subsidizes' some of their services by leveraging them to gain valuable information. Google voice was used to train their voice analysis algorithms. Recaptcha has been used to transcribe text for google books, road signs etc for street view, and now objects for waymo.

If I had to bet, photos was subsidized by the value of the training pool it generated for their object recognition neural networks. The cost of image storage has only gone up, and the I would image they have enough images to train on, so they did the math and removed the major incentive (unless you buy one of their phones).

I would also bet that they had a meeting at some point trying to figure out how to push people to sign up for google one storage. I just wish they had decided to offer legit customer support for paid users.

> Anil Sabharwal, Google Photos’ then-head, said in a blog post when the service launched in 2015. “And when we say a lifetime of memories, we really mean it.”

That sure did change and within the classic 5-year business plan model as well.

>Most of Google’s product strategy has been bait & switch, and I say that with all due to respect to the engineers. It’s the leaders who make these decisions

Yes, though how many where planned and how many organicly just ended up that way from a business perspective.

We are all used to the marketing budget phase of companies, initially offering great services and deals, just to get a foothold and then after that period, change bit by bit with the niceties eroded away.

Sad to say that many company does this, just marketing wise it feels less obvious as they are initially in effect using the customer base as the marketing with word of mouth and as people love free, that works out. So down the line many will feel put out by such changes, some will stay with it be that economical evaluation or hassles in moving (not everybody a tech head), so a complacency lock-in happens with so many.

Personally the straw with google came from the endless robotic termination stories having all the services pulled for one misinterpreted action upon on another service they just happen to run. But more so the way they handled Google Music, forcing those who paid for content to be shafted towards a platform just forcing you to pay again as some subscription model to access features you had before and would expect. With that, faith in many things Google does will be tainted, however good intention they seem, the worst case down the line thoughts will stick out way more from all the past instances now.

That all said, I do get it, companies operate to make profit, otherwise they are not a company but a charity. Still, false advertising needs to catchup with the digital age and T&C needs some form of regulation as currently it's still a bit of a mess. After all, people brought Google Phones, sold by Google and some would of done so on the back of what was said in 2015 - so there is that whole avenue of debate that may play out legally. So could be something that gets more depth in the comming months.

I'm an avid photographer and had a few friends who were hooked on google photos, I've always been skeptical because I know how pricey storage can get and figured this would always happen. I'm glad I didn't move all my photos onto Google Photos like my friends, I don't envy their situation now.

Their situation of having to pay $24 a year?

My friends have at least 1TB. My one buddy who was the biggest google advocate has 10TB+. He moved all his photos there and deleted them off harddrives etc.

Photos you've already uploaded remain free.

In fact I believe photos uploaded until some time next year still won't count towards your storage.

They are not changing down the service, merely changing the price for it. A price increase after 5 years of service can hardly be considered "bait and switch".

We need to remember that $0 is still a price.

If $0 is a price, Google is increasing the price by an excessive infinity%.

Another way of looking at this, perhaps, is that business concerns are deterministic. Deterministic is too strong a word, of course... but that's the idea.

15 years ago, the milkiness of potential cash cows was unknown. Search had an ad model that worked really well, as long as you had majority market share. Meanwhile, google had some great wed development chops. They could make a move on email, rss, a web based office suite and sweep the whole market in a short span. It was cheap enough, and each one might turn out to be a major business. Being free made sense. Higher product success rates and who cares about $10m here and there. The goal was that some of these would become multi billion dollar businesses.

I'm sure people remember the "google wipeouts" of startup territories when they released the latest something for free.

Fast forward... the bar for financial success is 25X bigger. Google's main problem is putting capital to work. We're way less naive about financial potential. Most of Google's important competitive dynamics are within oligopolies. There aren't hundreds of startups that threaten android or even youtube at any given time. A lot of the rollovers from Google pre 2010 just don't make a ton of sense.

You end up with these business/product units arbitrarily attached to stuff in the business. It's not obvious what they're for commercially, which makes them hard to manage. A commercially self sustaining unit can just operate like a business. It's easier.

It's the organisational version of technical debt.

I suspect they placed some big bets initially on the value they could derive from it for use with AI/ML. Perhaps they've since realised that they bought too much into the surrounding hype (much of it generated by their own marketing) and are starting to view that strategy as a liability should governments start tackling privacy.

A lifetime of memories offers the greatest opportunity for bait and switch "marketing". Do you think the statement you quote means that Google 5 years ago meant to make a gift to users, but then someone changed course?

What did the leaders say to their engineers, did they mislead them?

Thanks for giving us all the machine learning data. We no longer need your services.

I would contend that the people who do pay for Google Photos are now potential customers of lots of the other apps, and hence can be advertised to as such.

it sucks but.. yeah, that's how it works.

And that is enabled by VC funded culture, where you have million of dollars invested in companies, which can then offer services at a loss investing in something else (market share, training data, etc.).

Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.

In this case though, a smaller company might not be around forever. When you’re looking at storing important photos, the service you think will last longest may be best.

(I use Flickr, Gphotos and an S3 bucket but I’m paranoid)

I use Flickr as well but I also back up in other ways, including locally. As I wrote on another thread, I'd never depend on a photo sharing site as my primary storage.

Flickr changed hands a couple times, almost went under and is still struggling to stay afloat. So you're right to be paranoid. I have been a paying Flickr Pro user since the beginning of time, but I don't feel that my photos are any 'safer' there than they would be on Google Photos.

Also, Flickr has done an arguably nastier bait and switch when they announced the end of their unlimited free storage. At least Google seems to be willing to keep the photos already uploaded around. For now.

> Using smaller companies which charge honestly for the services they provide is probably more sustainable in the long term.

Smaller companies also commonly get acquired, shuttered, or become big companies in their own right. There's no panacea here. I think by the third or fourth time I was migrating from "the honesty priced option" the reality settled in that "honestly priced" is usually just an uninventive advertising moniker used for overpriced underdeveloped products.

But users also benefit from it. You can search for the contents of the images in your private gallery.

“private”

has Google ever made your data public?

Not private doesn't mean public.

Can google guarantee this data is not used to fuel their ad or other businesses in anyway ?

Can they guarantee US Law Enforcement Agencies(LEA) will not have access without due process and informing you ?

Can they guarantee LEAs from other countries will not given access to this data ?

Private = only you, and no one else, not even Google.

Google has had data leaks and hacks, yes. It’s not private unless you own it and control it.

If you send it to Google it is unequivocally not private.

We benefit daily from all sorts of horrors, that's not a justification to keep doing horrors.

That's bit of a hyperbole. How is ML horror?

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/technology/china-surveill...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/12/19/federal...

By providing ML training data, you're indirectly supporting the consolidation of power in the hands of the few who have the ability to surveil everyone and the physical might to enforce their will.

My urine like everyone else's contains potassium and can be used to create gunpowder - does this mean I am enabling terrorists to blow people up every time I take a leak?

If you and millions of other people captured, packaged, and transmitted that urine to a central urine clearinghouse (similar to how Google Photos works), then yes. Innocuous activities can easily be made dangerous when those activities are centralized and scaled up to a level involving/affecting hundreds of millions of people.

You mean like that one time when it tagged blacks as apes? I'm sure the users feel like they made a great deal.

Yes, let's cherry pick this one example to invalidate all ML strides in image recognition under the guise of racism, surely that seems reasonable.

The google AI will think cats rule the earth.

that kind of statement is harsh. what gives you a guarantee that any other paid service is not going to do this "machine learning" on your data. has Google ever made public your data?

I think the point is if you charge upfront for storing peoples data under a certain price plan, you're less likely to change anything regarding the deal because you're in the business of storing peoples data. If you do bad, people will stop using the service, and you lose your business. You're more aligned with your users.

Compare it to Google, where they can operate under a loss for a particular service (like Google Photos) in order to increase profits in a different market (like AI recognition tools). Once they are done with whatever they wanted to do, they can close down the service without much consequence, the business lives on.

Well they still want extra 15GB.

It's not about entitlement, it's not about wanting something for free as some other replies are trying to justify this kind of practice. It's about how offering something for free destroys genuine competition. Once the competition is destroyed, users will have no other option but to pay the price Google is asking. Users can't search for a better price or better service because there is no other competing business that can offer a better anything.

Your comment hits the nail on the head. It's anticompetitive behaviour, and in the end consumers don't have a choice because competitors have gone out of business. If it's a valuable product or service (e.g. lifetime memories), consumers are then held to ransom. It has been going on for years, and it will continue to get worse until we rearch some kind of tipping point where people start to really care.

It didn't work though, there's like 1 billion ways to store photos. At the end of the day DropBox started as just a wrapper around Amazon S3 buckets, it's not exactly a high barrier to entry.

The storage is a small piece of the Google Photos offering. Good luck searching for a persons name or "sunsets", getting time hops, stylized suggestions and collages, or easy group sharing on a trip in solutions like DropBox or S3, especially for the average user.

That's the weirdest thing to me about this conversation. People act like storage is the main thing Google Photos does, but that's not by a long shot the most compelling piece of the offering.

This seems specious. Others absolutely have competing options, Apple's photos the most notable (since it's by the other Phone OS maker). None as good as Google photos imo (at least not that I've tried), but on release there was nothing as good as Google Photos either.

And now that they are charging, presumably there's space for competition to arise again no? Just as if they started charging at the outset?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch

I honestly can't see the outrage here. Sure, they've closed their free tier, but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners and do not count images previously uploaded. That's really more than one can ask for in something they get for free.

That's the thing though, you don't really get it for free do you? You just pay with your privacy and data instead.

To whom do you believe google has disclosed private user photos?

they're so big disclosing those photos to their algorithms is questionable privacy-wise.

If you know this is a risk, then Google certainly does.

what is the privacy loss outcome that you are suggesting has happened as a result of photos being disclosed to algorithms?

use your imagination. Sheesh this is such a boring line of questioning that borders on disingenuous and obtuse for a social news site that caters to people in AdTech.

You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines a lot, by using HN for political and ideological battle, flaming other users, and so on. We've had to warn you about this many times:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23452134

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480233

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21480058

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20717150

Would you please fix this? The intended use of the site is curious, thoughtful conversation. I'm not going to ban you right now because (not counting the last week) you've posted good, on-topic comments too. But if you continue along the same lines we're going to have to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

That's interesting that you seem to think it's my problem. I also find it disingenuous that you are linking to my previous comments publically. Are you trying to shame me? Maybe you need to disallow political discussions period? Have you considered that the people I am replying to are also fighting a political battle that you are biased for?

All in all, yes I believe certain things passionately. Like racism and sexist exist in America, specifically in software and corporate America. I also believe that this bias shows on this community because of the demographic or people who browse and comment here.

I'm not trying to shame you; sorry if it had that effect. I post links like that when I imagine it might be helpful to users who are trying to decide (as users always try to decide) if the moderator is being excessive or not.

Banning political discussions is not possible for a bunch of reasons, but the most important one is that it would be bad for curiosity, which is the thing we try to optimize HN for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...). There are too many intellectually interesting topics with political overlap—and ultimately, some political overlap on virtually every topic.

At the same time, not moderating political discussions is also not an option because that would also be bad for curiosity. So we're in a bit of a tradeoff with constraints on either side and no easy solution. I've written about this a lot in the past: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so.... If you or anyone reads those explanations and still has a question that I haven't answered yet, I'd like to know what it is.

As for bias, everyone always feels that the mods are biased against their position when we moderate this way (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...). I'd never claim we're unbiased—who could?—but the bar for reaching that conclusion needs to be a little higher. I can show you a long, long list of HN commenters complaining bitterly that HN is biased in favor of your positions (i.e. the politics/ideology you happen to favor). Every passionate user feels that the bias runs against their side.

I'd be cautious about assuming things about the "demographic or people who browse and comment here". We don't have that data—no one does—and HN is basically a gigantic projection screen or Rohrschach diagram out of which people draw their own pre-existing positions. (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) I know this because everyone does this, and the universal property their statements have in common is not their conclusions about HN (those are wildly contradictory) but the fact that they always see HN—both mods and community—as opposed to their own view. (One explanation for this is https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...)

Network effects, unintended side effects, operator incompetence, risk of information leak... GDPR should have me covered, but I won’t be able to remove myself from deep learning models they already have.

That is not true. Google retrains its models periodically. Removed data is not used for training models. Also I'm not sure that private user photos can even be used for training cross user models because I don't see how these photos could possibly be disclosed to raters, so there would be no ground truth.

Not OP but technically the FBI as a matter of public fact and obligation (child pornography in that case). Probably more "run a known hash list against it and peak manually before reporting to verify that it isn't a freak collision with a perectly innocent photograph of a cupcake" style unless reported.

In the US there is "no reasonable expectation of privacy" for data voluntarily given to third-parties [0]

US government agencies can simply ask for such data, and companies can just pass it along, all without even evoking any of the countless surveillance laws [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine

[1] https://cantheyseemydick.com/

Thats not how promises work.

The internet is full of entitled people. I've never seen such entitled people in real life. Unfortunately lately HN is no different. I am also an avid user of Google Photos. From my perspective, they did keep their promise. They will store your photos for free before a certain timeline. Just because someone did a favor to you for some time, that doesn't mean you are entitled to their help forever.

i mean, paying for google photos storage is not even that expensive. it's $10 for 2TB, which i happily pay every month because it means i don't have to worry about photos backups.

Try running a content platform with an API.

I've never comes across so many developers who feel like they are entitled to unlimited API access for free so they can build businesses on top of your platform.

Yeah man, when someone says "i'll give you $5 ever day for life" and then in 5 years they say "i'm not going to do that anymore starting tomorrow" and being upset about that is such entitled behavior.

The correct analogy would be "you can ask me for $5 as often as you want, I will give it to you for free, and you can keep it for life" and then 5 years down the road they say "starting 7 months from now, I'll stop giving you $5 when you ask me for it, but obviously you can still keep all the money I gave you".

I feel like people misconstrue "you can upload your photos and (store them for free for life)" to "you can (upload your photos and (store them for free for life) for life)".

As I understood it, it is only free for previous Pixel owners until they buy a new Pixel. So it is free for the lifetime of the device, not the users lifetime.

Isn't that how most people would have understood the offer anyways? Why should Google store the photos from e.g. your new OnePlus for free just because you owned a Pixel in the past?

Presumably because they promised the service in return for the purchase of a Pixel device, not its continued use.

> but they keep up the promise for Pixel owners

True, but for how long?

Has anyone cracked the "DRM" on this? Can I just install a hacked app and have it think I'm a pixel owner? Does it just use the EXIF headers to identify the device?

Why risk getting your Google account banned?

I feel like the email they sent is a master class in misleading. The feeling and subtext make you feel like nothing is happening or you'll be better off:

> To build for the future and welcome even more memories, Google Photos is changing its unlimited high-quality storage policy. Starting Ju ne 1 , 2 02 1, new photos and videos backed up in high-quality will begin to count toward users' 15 GB of Google Account storage, which is shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Photos.

> Your Pixel device will not be impacted by this change. High - quality uploads from your Pixel device will continue to be free and unlimited. This exemption only applies to uploads made from your Pixel device, not uploads from other devices or via photos.google.com.

I'm with you. I'm a big fan of Google Photos, in fact I'd go so far as to say I'd take very few pictures if not for it. Not because of the storage, but because of the ease with which it allows me to reminisce and organize my photos. I'd happily pay the couple bucks a month for it if it's what keeps it viable, I'd much rather that than the kill the service.

And they're giving 8 months notice and everything up to that point will continue to be supported for free. It's kind of crazy to me that people have a problem with it.

If you have to start paying for photo storage, you may as well move them somewhere with better privacy.

I'm giving Amazon Photos a try, since they offer unlimited high quality storage with Prime. I will appreciate if someone shares their opinion about this service.

“Unlimited”, until it is limited. Amazon already bait-and-switched on unlimited Amazon Cloud Drive storage. Microsoft, too, on OneDrive, before Amazon. Now Google. What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round?

Oh, nothing. But until they do, why pay Google, if I already pay Prime?

> What makes you believe Amazon will honor “unlimited” this time round?

Because Amazon has an incentive to keep me as a Prime customer (I'll buy more crap on Amazon). Most people don't pay Google a single cent.

So it's not that I trust Amazon, it's that the economic model for Amazon including unlimited storage in my Prime membership makes sense.

(Note: I wouldn't bet on Amazon staying unlimited for the next 50 years, just providing the counter-argument.)

They had an incentive to keep me as an Amazon Cloud Drive customer, too, until they decided they didn’t if I stored more than 1TB. So I canceled.

In the case of Prime I doubt a non-negligible percentage of Prime customers would cancel over losing unlimited storage, so the incentive to keep it unlimited is even smaller.

I wouldn't count on it considering they unbundled ad free twitch from prime 2 years ago [0].

[0]: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/20/17761760/twitch-prime-tur...

Have used it but this sounds a lot like kicking the can down the road. Don’t be surprised if/when Amazon does the same thing and/or just lets photos Languish.

I encourage a self-hosted solution with backups. There are many, some super easy for non-tech folk to use (synology for example)

I am indeed self-hosting, but just a Raspberry Pi+HD. The Google/Amazon Photos is the backup/convenience. Since I want off-site backups in case something happens in my apartment, when/if Amazon goes this road I'll probably rent some general purpose storage in the cloud.

Check out backblaze. Crazy cheap for backups (0.005/GB/month or so IIRC) and you can easily encrypt before doing so to maintain privacy.

Oh, I have Amazon Prime and didn't know Amazon Photos existed!

Is it a PITA to switch from Google Photos, or is it just a case of installing an Amazon Photos app and enabling sync?

I've been using it for a few weeks already. tldr: It's slightly worse than Google photos in most respects and quite a bit worse for albums.

* The AI is fine, although not as good as Google's.

* Albums are far less featureful. The shared link doesn't even show the album title. You can't add text or locations like you can on Gphotos. This makes trip albums less good IMO.

* Scrolling and UI seem faster, although I have far fewer photos.

* Desktop upload is nice for people who have non-smartphone cameras

* Albums list can be sorted by Date Created or Name. GPhotos default sort is by the date of the most recent photo. * Adding and removing from albums seems slower, but is also async, so /shrug

* Selecting multiple photos is much harder- Google allows a Press, hold, swipe gesture to select multiple photos. Amzn doesn't have that on the app. On web, they do have shift+Click, though.

* Different photo layouts is nice

* The shared photo screen is very aggressively in your face about advertising amazon photos. GPhotos has no ads.

* AFAICT, Amzn does not share the accounts/names of signed-in people who access shared content. Gphotos leaks this info to anyone who views the shared content. It's one of my main problems with GPhotos.

I have not really tested the "Groups" feature (which seems to be the equivalent of shared albums).

It's a lot nicer importing and exporting photos with Amazon Prime Photos. Google Takeout is a nightmare to use.

That's what Google is organizationally unable to understand. They consider you giving them all your data to be a perfectly private thing to do. In fact, in a way, they consider themselves to be sort of guardians of your privacy, since they only look at it themselves and don't let anybody else take advantage of it. To anyone outside Google this not what "privacy" means, of course, but that's the internal mantra.

I don't think they thought this through actually. If I have to pay, I'll pay for Apple iCloud instead, since it has better integration with my devices.

> If I have to pay, I'll pay for Apple iCloud instead, since it has better integration with my devices.

If you ever, for whatever reason, stop using Apple devices, can you continue using your iCloud storage from other devices? If not, that'd be a deal breaker for me.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204283

I suppose. The usability of Google Photos is pretty awesome, though, I'd find it very difficult to switch. Both the Android app and the web app are maintained and work extremely well (imho, ymmv). Does video, too. Tight integration with Android devices and other Google products, fairly convenient sharing functionality, and almost everybody has a Google account. (This is what Microsoft devotees must have felt like in the early 00s...) And at this point I'm easily served by the lowest tier, 20 EUR for 100 GB.

I use infomaniak's kdrive, which, I think, has a reasonable price: 64CHF (=~USD) per year for 2Tb.

I pay $99/year for the consumer 2TB plan. It lets us store full size stills and videos.

To put it in perspective, one family night out at a seafood restaurant costs about that much, and a couple of frappuccinos a month can add up to that much in a year.

Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less? It's hard to figure the sweet spot, but the convenience factor is huge.

Yeah, and Google Photos you can easily access no-nonsense from your phone, your friend’s house, multiple laptops, etc.

That's the main thing for me, and probably for the majority of people who don't want to or can't set up a home storage system with backups and redundancy etc.

I got married recently. We really enjoyed the shared photo album feature of Google Photos. Apple has this too, but Google Photos is platform-agnostic. It works on Android, iOS, and the plain old web. We were able to set up a shared photo album, text a link to friends, and they could add all their photos to the album pretty easily.

Trying to organize that using other apps would be difficult. Apple requires everyone to have an iCloud / iOS device. Other services require someone to sign up / download an app. Since most people have a google account already Google Photos was very easy for this use case.

I think it's terrible that the next step up from that plan is $999/year up to 20TB. Consumers shouldn't have to pay in orders of magnitude for storage they "could" but are not yet consuming. I'm not sure what I'll do when I hit the 2TB limit.

I'm legit planning to just download it all, store on multiple drives/computers, send a copy to my brother in another state to stash in his vault, and then clear the 2TB and start over.

Unless they boost the storage.

> Then again, a 5TB hard drive is, what? $119 or less?

Cloud services are hilariously inefficient at using storage space. A 1MB image you upload might use 10MB or more of space amongst their servers. (eg. 1.5 RS encoded copies in each of 7 datacenters). Oh, and theres a good chance it'll be stored on SSD rather than hard drives because while you might think you only access that 1MB image once per decade on average, the reality is it probably gets read once a month (resyncing new devices, scanning quickly through the webui, ML models rebuilding search indexes, re-striping to new SSD's or rebalancing, etc.). Once a month reads for 1MB of data become spindle (IO) limited rather than space limited for hard drives, normally making SSD's cheaper cos spindles are expensive.

I don't think that's inefficient as such, that's just the price you pay for data durability. Sure you can buy a high capacity HDD on Amazon for very little, but most people would be pretty sad if/when the hard drive dies and takes the family photo collection with it.

The full-size photos are still compressed, unfortunately. And Google Photos turns Live Photos into 2-3 sec video files, which destroyed a huge chunk of my photo library when I made the switch to iCloud Photo Library.

Isn't this the classic pattern followed by almost all startups? Create a product that loses money and attracts users. Sustain it with VC money until you have a large number of users who are highly dependent on the product. Then switch to profitability, knowing you can do so because you've already hit critical mass and users aren't easily able to switch away.

You don't have to like it, but it is legal and it is how many of the most celebrated startups got to where they are today.

Owning slaves was also "legal" some point in time.

Google isn't a startup any more and hasn't been for a decade or more at this point. Google Photos was only launched in 2015 far out of the scrappy startup stage and into the area of using their success in other areas to crush competition in a new area by willingly losing money while starving the competition.

Can we talk about alternatives? I am not a Google Photos user but I struggle to find a good privacy-aware or self-hosting solution.

Currently I am hosting my photos on my nextcloud instance. But the support from the iOS app for photos is really bad and there seems to be no good webdav photo viewer on iOS.

So what about Piwigo [1] then? They allow self-hosting (does it run well on a raspi?) and have a pretty reasonably priced commercial solution (you have to go to the "individual" tab).

What else is there?

[1] piwigo.org [2] https://piwigo.com/pricing

I've bought a Synology NAS which comes with a builtin Synology Moments application. It's pretty much a self-hosted Google Photos (including web gallery, sharing and mobile app which autobackups directly to your NAS).

I still use Google Photos for convenience sake, but having a safe copy owned by myself on harddrives I own by myself is still worthwhile.

And setup was very easy - couple of clicks on web UI to enable the package and installing the mobile app.

Which model did you get? I've thought about one for a while, but the prices seem more entry level business than personal.

I used a lowend ds213j for along time but now I've upgraded to 218+ (I think there's now 220 as well?) because I wanted btrfs, hardware transcoding for Plex and ability to run some of my stuff in docker.

Good idea. Just looked up the „Moments“ app in the iOS app store and consensus seems to be that it is pretty bad and slow (sub 3 star rating).

Also FWIW, you can run the Synology OS itself (DSM) on general x86 hardware or VMs via the Xpenology [1] bootloader which is pretty awesome. The DSM is a fairly single-admin friendly network applicance OS anyway with a decent GUI and support. Of course, their NAS hardware offerings make the whole thing more appliance-like and with official support, but if the matrix doesn't fit your needs or desires (I wanted my data on ZFS for example) DSM on your own hardware may still be worth giving a look.

I actually like Synology's software in some ways more than their hardware for many use cases, kind of wish I could just officially buy a license for that (though I guess it works for them in that familiarity means I have recommended them to some small businesses).

----

1: https://xpenology.org/

If you are already on iOS I guess use Apples icloud?

While we are talking about Google Photos, I'm sure people will be thinking of how to extract their photos from the service.

I'd love to be able to recommend rclone here, but the Google API is just too limited for downloading photos: https://rclone.org/googlephotos/#limitations

Stripping the metadata and the resolution changes is unacceptable. (The resolution change only seems to affect videos for me but others have seen it on photos too).

I know Google engineers will be reading this - please fix the Google Photos API so it can be used to upload and download full quality, unaltered images or videos. I'm certainly getting the feeling that the Google Photos Web app (which is excellent) isn't eating the dog food of the Google Photos API.

In the mean time use Google takeout to extract your images.

I wrote about the same thing this is a classic bait and switch

However their free storage plan is still very generous when compared to apple and Dropbox also they storage plans are very reasonably priced as well

https://www.tecowly.com/2020/11/12/google-photos-to-stop-giv...

I don't really understand why people complain.

First of attracting customers with the low or zero price is kind of standard way of attracting customers. I've never heard people complaining that some shampoo free sample is no longer free or that some discounted item is no longer discounted.

Second, another mistake people make is personification of companies. Company is not a human being, it cannot be honest, nice, make promises, etc. Company is a business entity, it just have contract with the users (officially signed or some TOS, like Google has that people agree with). Companies typically reserves the right to change terms of such contracts and it just happened.

Some companies might have good PR and make PR driven promises - if someone believes that, it is only that person problem.

If someone really thinks that companies support gay community because they "like" gay people, they are wrong. They support gay people only in countries where gay people are accepted and such PR move will bring them popularity (putting six colors rainbow as a company logo background costs companies $0, and they get good, cheap PR in return).

If companies really wanted to support gay people they would do all those "gay pride" stuff in countries where gays are sent to jail, but, as one can easily check, they carefully omit those places.

I'm still bitter that they removed the Google Drive to Google Photos sync. That allowed me to organize my photos on disk, and control what lived in Google Photos.

Without that setup Google Photos is like a vast sea of images that you can only scroll by date. There is no filtering, etc. so if you want to edit your Google Photos, you're limited to in-browser selection and album creation which is of little use with tens of thousands of images.

what I want to know: why would storage prices increase when storage costs continue to plummet (and network ingress costs remain cheap due to asymmetric use vs serving)

spitballing...

- gphotos was free when google wanted the data for training algorithms. They now have the data they need and it's become a cost center. Given Android integration, that amount is substantial.

- the paid plans are underperforming, and this seemed like an easy way to catch up.

- the overall google "fleet" is facing capacity pressure across storage-intensive apps (e.g. gmail ?) and photos seemed like the easier solution, i.e. start charging and people will use less storage.

- mobile device camera resolution may be growing faster than storage costs are decreasing ?

- online photo hosting also requires serving the images (not just "backup") and users can't wrap their heads around a split charge for serving ?

- online storage costs are now dominated by the cost of power, real estate etc ? but as drives double in capacity, their power/etc costs should be halved as well...

thoughts?

Much like when you pay for a good meal, the majority of what you're paying for is labor. Hardware is cheap. IT departments are not.

Right. But storage costs are per-GB, so as disks get denser then all costs drop per GB.

I expect that the issue is more likely that 99.999% of people are using the service are doing so "normally", but the 0.001% who are not are using disproportionally large amounts of data/abusing the service at the detriment of others etc.

I have no doubt that there are people out there doing shady/dodgy things to abuse the free "unlimited" storage and pumping in huge huge huge amounts of data or have hacked up some crazy system to use it as some sort of hacked-up rsync, using it for bulk image classification instead of spin up their own service etc etc etc

Charging a relatively small fee to high users while leaving it free for the vast majority seems like a fair way of trying to slow down abuse to me - I think they did the same thing with the Google Maps APIs a year or two ago (i.e. turn down the free tier significantly and make it cost a small-but-not-zero amount to stop people abusing it)

I currently pay £1.33 a month for more storage - so like half a starbucks coffee. Seems fair to me considering how many years of photos I have in there.

or you could just set limit which would be enough for 99.99% users and charge the people who don't find it sufficient

but 15GB is what, 1000-3000 photos at best nowadays with zero videos, with videos it will be gone within days/weeks

I would more understand if they would set up 1000 photos monthly limit instead size limit

btw. I don't use Google photos, so I don't really care what they offer

California's unfair practices act says: "It is unlawful for any person engaged in business within this State to sell any article or product at less than the cost thereof to such vendor or to give away any article or product, for the purpose of injuring competitors or destroying competition."

Could a case be made that Google did this with their free unlimited storage move?

> Could a case be made that Google did this with their free unlimited storage move?

Among other things Google has done, yes. (IANAL)

I wish they would do this with gmail.

My dmarc reports say I'm authenticated and aligned but mail from my server goes to spam even though I'm the only user on the domain and never send automated or group emails. Relaying it via icloud fails everything but gets delivered to people's mailbox. WTF?

For anyone looking for other options: I've been very pleased with Microsoft's Onedrive offering; I pay $70/year for access to all the Office apps plus 1TB of storage and their family plan is $100/year and supports up to 6 people, with 1TB of storage per account.

Any idea if I can buy the family plan and use 6TB for myself?

Sure can. The Microsoft plan allows you to ungoogle yourself.

Get a @your-domain-name email which comes with the same corporate outlook with calendar integration and everything else that comes with it.

Also, 1 TB.

---

Another good option is Apple - they charge reasonably 0.99$ for 50 GB

---

Finally, dropbox is really good too and I have been using them since the beginning.

I don't think you can use 6TB on a single account, you would probably need to create multiple accounts.

Theoretically you can. You just need 6 different email addresses and add them to your onedrive account. You won't be able to use it as a single 6TB volume though.

Yandex disk has unlimited photo storage for now and I don't think Yandex is going anywhere, at worst they will start charging for it.

I moved everything over to Amazon Prime which is now the unlimited free storage choice for photos. When they bring the hammer down, I'll move it to the next website of the day.

We need to get used to paying for online services from the start. It would change the dynamic of dumping hundreds of millions of dollars in VC money into startups that only focus on user growth.

If smaller startups were profitable, we would have more alternatives for all the basic online needs we now have like storage, and search products for digital content we cherish. Offering free products at a loss for years to steal users from competitors would not be as good a strategy as it now is.

I don't have much of a problem with Google wanting to charge for photo storage, as services aren't free to run. However, with Google's track record of spontaneously killing services (even paid ones), I'm looking to find alternatives that are less at risk of being rebranded or shut down on a manager's whim. Does anyone have experience with a competing product?

Is there yet any effective cloud to cloud migration tool or service? I don't mean cloud to PC back to different cloud ...

Checkout rclone

Last time I checked there wasn't a google photos api for expiring photos and metadata.

The Data Transfer Project is working on this although I believe it's still fairly early stage.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/20/17589246/data-transfer-pr...

*I work at Google but not on this

Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Somehow I had never heard of it - https://datatransferproject.dev/updates

There does seem to be some activity, although it also seems to be slowing a bit... https://github.com/google/data-transfer-project/graphs/code-...

Nows the time to purchase that Dell r720xd and install TrueNAS on it. The software is mature and the hardware is up for a steal pre-owned.

https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/1323778579273043968

I can tell you from personal experience that r720xd are VERY LOUD and use a huge amount of power 200-300W!

If that isn't a problem then go for it, they last forever in my experience.

You must have had a issue with your hardware or firmware because my r720xd is quiet. Only loud during post boot test.

There will probably be a handful of users who go bananas with rage and start blindly uploading everything they can before the cutoff. I have a feeling there will be some very interesting stuff accidentally being uploaded in the coming months, and we will probably hear about some it.

time to do some cleanup. surely the auto-sync / auto-backup in Google Photos app has uploaded a shiploaded of photos not needed. also check gmail & drive for large attachments/files and see if they can be deleted .

time-consuming, yes .

From what I understand, the photos uploaded up to that time will not count toward the used space even after that. So only newly uploaded photos will start counting toward the usage.

First and foremost, Google is an advertising company. And this is reflected in everything they do.

The idea that Google is a technology company --- is really just another marketing facade. Their technology is only as good as it has to be to further their advertising objectives. Any product they offer is subject to the whims of their advertising needs.

All of which leads to the current state of affairs. You wouldn't expect "free" technology or data storage from a restaurant. And you shouldn't expect it from an ad company either.

Any disappointment here is really a reflection of unrealistic expectations and naive acceptance of Google's marketing hype.

In short, if it’s free, there’s usually a catch...

How likely could GMail follow the same path ?

It's only going to get more difficult to switch to another email provider as time passes, you should switch now.

I would even go as far as to suggest setting up your email with your own domain. This way switching providers is as easy as just changing a few DNS settings.

I've been running that setup for a few years now and it has been flawless. Spam is almost entirely gone, with a catch-all address I can simply sign up to websites with <website name>@mydomain, makes it easy to track down if one of them ends up doing shady things with your mail!

I have a few domain names but I don't know which one I should use to replace my usual firstnameletter.lastname@gmail.com.

Should I go for firstname.lastname@hardtochooseamongwhatsleftdomain.com or mail@firstnamelastname.com ?

I personally have a "vanity" domain that spells out my last name (the TLD forms the last two letters). So I just have <firstname>@<domain> for personal stuff, and then for example git@<my domain> for github, spotify@<my domain> for spotify etc.

The mail@firstnamelastname.com approach seems like a clean way to do it as well.

That would decimate google user accounts if it happened.

Given that Gmail does not have, and never has had, infinite free storage it seems quite hard for it to follow the same path... It's already there.

Specifically, Gmail had 1GB quota at launch. These days you have 15GB combined across Drive, Gmail and Photos for free, and paid plans if you need more space.

Back in the day Gmail was growing its free space nonstop. No longer.

https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/Undo-Gmail-2.png

Didn’t they use to have a counter on the home page telling you how many millions of megabytes were still available for gmail storage?

I think gmail has lower chance of this happening because google needs to feel the "pulse" on whats happening in the world by reading your email. Photos are quite repetitive and they done enough of AI training.

In fact I didn't knew until the news yesterday. Now I'm going to get hooked - upload all my pictures (landscape-only, people pictures stay offline) before the end of the free offer. AFAIK what you have already uploaded stays there and doesn't count when the offer changes.

If they don't charge you for the product, then, you are the product, eh?

Well, guys, does anyone use amazon prime photos? Is it as good at google photos? My main usage was automatically backing up all my phone pics.

Haha. Cost savings from management at Google.

It was too good to be true (for ever)

Preserving your life's memories has never been cheaper — regardless of where and how you store it. Pay up or shut up, seriously.

Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1150/

Can't upvote that enough times. Funny how the truth hurts sometimes. Thanks for the link.

I like the comic and it's definitely hilarious, and but it's not necessarily an apt comparison. Imagine the same situation with a bank holding your money. Are you paying them? (I assume you're not... I guess if you are, you probably shouldn't be.) Does that mean they're not in the business of storing your money and should be able to just give it away if you don't claim it in a month?

Reading into this beyond what you were intending I'd love for private data to be as regulated as money

Interesting idea... are you sure? Do you want to pay extra fees to transfer it internationally, have to deal with sanctions/etc. depending on where you're sending it, pay taxes on it when you acquire it, have a copy sent to the government if it's over 10KB of data, etc.?

Yes.. that sounds honestly perfect. Make them respect the data.

Send a copy though.. do you have to give the government 10 grand when you send 10 grand? Course not. But you would tell the government it exists if it goes anywhere

I'd love private data to be regulated as private data, with privacy/liability laws and such.

Interest rates are b/c a bank can invest your money. They differ from, say, a gold storage company that keeps your gold secure but has no right to invest or otherwise trade it.

But these comics often misrepresent the issue (for humorous effect). It sounds like chad was never asked if it was ok to store stuff in his garage, chad never promoted as such.

Gmail was promoted as a free service.

probably going to migrate to icloud soon

Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.

It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.

>Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its essentially free. Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it, and at an ever-spiraling decreasing price.

And yet I can't find a cheap host for 2-4TB that's not like $10/month or so... even with Glacier it's $16/4TB/month...

KS-3 Server - Atom N2800 - 4GB DDR3 1066 MHz - 2TB SATA $9.99/month

https://www.kimsufi.com/us/en/order/kimsufi.xml?reference=18...

No RAID, but it's in your desired price range.

Yep, it's possible with a dedicated or vps with 4TB or more, but this doesn't suit my use case (backup).

I want the storage replicated geo-redunduntly backed-up and safer, Glacier/Backblaze/etc-style, not just lost whenever someone breaks into the server or there's a hardware issue at the hosting company, etc. Basically "upload and forget"...

Same way, I can't find any good Squarespace/Ghost/Wordpress.com style service where I can run 3-4 sites that's not like $10/month per site or so...

I'd appreciate a service that charges you based on actual traffic load, not mere website count/custom domain, and that is "post content and forget".

Maybe https://wasabi.com/cloud-storage-pricing/#three-info ?

Supposedly $5.99/TB/Month

Something like that functionality-wise, but it's still more than Glacier ($16 vs $22 for ~4TB).

No egress charges, so it's cheaper than Glacier for some use cases.

That's true. I want more of a "store and very rarely retrieve" however, and there's no sub-$10/month service for 2-3TB yet.

Are there any options like these with redundancy built into the storage?

It's a proxy for usage that fairly non-technical consumers can understand.

> It'd be like charging for windows-up or windows-down on a taxi ride.

Or like charging for time or distance travelled, when the 'real cost' is fuel?

>> essentially free

Well Google is going to charge you $240 annually for a TB of storage now.

Where? I see $10 a month or $100 a year prepaid for 2 TB: https://one.google.com/u/1/storage

Where does this meme of "storage is essentially free" come from? A 4TB drive is already like ~$100 and that's without any fault tolerance. Now purchase some for yourself, geo-replicate it across the world, make it be online 24/7 and accessible with high speed worldwide, and tell me how it came out to be "essentially free"?

Marginal cost. You don't build one network per drive.

I wouldn't personally say "essentially free" though.

The network was hardly the culprit in my explanation. How much is the cost of 4TB of georeplicated storage do you think? Surely you have to at least pay for the storage itself? So like $300-$400 at least if it's replicated 3-4x? And I haven't even hinted at offline backups and all kinds of other things.

That sounds deliberately dense. Understand what marginal cost is. A megabyte of storage used to cost $1000. Today it costs $400 / 1,000,000.

To store a photo is not a penny. Its some percents of a penny. You wouldn't bend over to pick it up on the street.

> To store a photo is not a penny. Its some percents of a penny. You wouldn't bend over to pick it up on the street.

You're storing 1 photo (like 3MB)?? Or like thousands/millions?

Give me an estimate for how much you think 4TB of replicated storage costs if you think I overestimated?

For Google? A small fraction of what you guessed, in bulk.

Marginal cost is meaningless when you are dealing with exponential values. There are four trillion photos on Google Photos currently. That number is increasing faster than the cost of drives is going down.

<citation>?

Storage is growing faster. That's my point.

I did not mean the network as the internet network, but as the whole replicated system including almost all the different layers.

Maybe close to free on a per bit basis but I guess electricity, bandwidth, redundancy etc aren't. Photos is one of the products I'm actually happy to pay for extra storage. €100 buys my 2TB of storage that I can share with my wife and my kids when they are old enough. Knowing that any pic I snap is backed up is worth the cost, photographs are one of the few things that are truly irreplaceable. Saying that based on advice from other threads I'll be doing a regular download from takeout.google.xom

Yeah they're nearly free too. For a photo, some invisible fraction of a penny per year.

We're being marketed storage by features, not by the cost of the thing. And in an efficient market in a sane world, that should drop to nearly free.

Those data centres just build themselves, right?

One data center for 1B people? Yes, per person.

Folks, try to understand marginal cost. Its a tiny number per person now, and plummeting.

> Folks, try to understand marginal cost.

'Marginal cost' doesn't work like you think it does.

Marginal cost means the cost for adding one new user. But they aren't paying to add one new user. They're paying for all users.

If each user's storage cost 1 dollar a month then yeah adding an individual new user is basically free. But if they're supporting 100 million users then it's a hundred million dollars a month. Which isn't free.

If you still don't quite get it - try this thought experiment. If storage is free then could you afford to set up a storage data centre? If not, why not? It's free after all, in your mind.

They're not charging a dollar. That's my point. They're raising their prices, while storage costs fall.

Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation. That's actually in the site guidlines.

> Lets try not to choose the most uncharitable interpretation.

I agreee! I think my argument is the most charitable. 'It costs money to store things. They're asking you to pay for it'. Seems most charitable, reasonable, and simplest explanation.

Your interpretation is 'each byte costs nothing so a hundred million dollar data centre also costs nothing' which is an uncharitable interpretation of what they're doing.

At the end of the day 'storing a billion photos is free' - your argument - is simply a provably false statement, as everyone in these threads keeps trying to explain to you.

Hey you're deliberately ignoring the cost per person, and the fact that raising prices while storage costs are falling dramatically is fiscally backward.

That extremely uncharitable view of 'free' is getting in the way of understanding. So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once. At a billion people served, its 10 cents per person per lifetime. So why $10 per month?

Get it now?

> So its a hundred million dollar data center, paid once.

In your mind, who pays for the hundred million dollar data centre?

Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question?

Anyway I've said all I have to say. Read my comments again if you want to understand. I'm out.

> Like I just said, the folks who use it. At 10 cents per person, that would about cover it. What's the question?

You repeatedly said 'Charging for storage is becoming silly. Its [sic] essentially free.'

Now you're saying you agree actually it requires hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and so people should be charged for it.

> Read my comments again if you want to understand.

But see how your comments contradict yourself? It should be free but people should pay for it. Which is it?

The price of storage is the price of maintenance not of storing.

Which, since its largely automated, is also essentially free.

>Storage is growing faster than humanity can fill it

Maybe, though I'm not sure it's without breaking a sweat. Also, someone is most definitely footing some rather large bills.

According to this blog post[0] the amount of data uploaded each day is over 4 petabytes. For Drive, Photos and Docs only, i.e. it doesn't even include YouTube.

[0]https://blog.google/products/photos/storage-policy-update/

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