Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by artursapek | Hacker News Reader

As a subscriber to additional storage with Google (20 GB, $5/year) I'm really happy to be reading this because it will allow me to fully use the space I've paid for. I believe it was the cheapest option when I subscribed and while I have crossed the free storage limit I have yet to fully use 20 GB.

I originally signed up for it because I was sporadically transferring a lot of high-res scans between a computer which my school owns and my own laptop, so a permanent dropbox-like folder would not have worked. Now I'll also be able to back up my music/photos dropbox-style with the same service. Smart move by Google for hitting both services, although it's kind of sad to see such a great startup being approached by the web's behemoth.

Your assumption (also the assumption in the article) is that the pricing won't change after it gets easier to fully use the space.

I would be really shocked if Google charged for a service like this, it fits in with Docs and Gmail which have both always been free and have made storage space easier to fully use. If anything, they will profit off of it by people investing in even more storage with them.

in addition as time progresses the cost of storage has gone down and can be expected to continue to do so.

Docs and gmail let you slowly fill available space while being exposed to Google Ads. A Dropbox clone would let you fill available space quickly without ads.

That's a fair point. It does look like they have an in-browser UI though, and it will drive more traffic to Google in general. The Chrome browser is another desktop app that doesn't directly benefit their ad campaign, but they have put a lot of time into.

Gmail has POP3, IMAP and SMTP for free without ads.

Yes, and GMail for mobile is ad-free. On average, though, I would expect more storage+bandwidth costs per ad impression from a GDrive user than from a GMail user, if GDrive turns out to be similar to Dropbox.

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