I recently migrated from Dropbox to Google One. I find Dropbox's personal pricing really baffling: you get 2 GB for free or have to move all the way up to 2 TB and pay £100 a year. 100GB for £16 via Google is a much more sensible offer.
I'm mindful with what I put on cloud storage (mainly photo/video backups with Google Photos). I'm fine bumping up as I use more, but I don't feel like you suddenly deserve to pay for 2TB cause you went 3MB over the 200GB limit. And for how cheap as storage is these days, I think the pricing models should be reconsidered.
But I'd be fine with more reasonable increments in steps of X smaller amount of GB.
If they did actually kill it, I can always export and move somewhere else, though it'd be a pain in the ass. In the meantime, it's like the only Google product I think is actually good and worth paying for.
I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.
Every time you buy a piece of software or hardware you get features you don't care about. Do I get angry that these features are included? Of course not. I just don't use them.
But somehow when it comes to quotas people feel like the price should somehow correspond to the cost of delivering the service. But it doesn't. It's just price segmentation, and as long as the pricing tiers are clearly advertised I don't think you have any right to be mad.
Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Figuring out where my data went is too much work, so I subscribed. Other people will delete old photos/attachments/files so they don't have to upgrade to the next pricing tier. Price segmentation works.
If I had a car that could hold my family of 4, and then I have another kid and my only option to upgrade from there is a school bus, I'm gonna be understandably annoyed. And you could just as easily say "well they don't make enough on cars so they need more people buying buses."
They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.
Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.
Google Cloud Storage is $0.02/ GB + a myriad of other charges for listing, accessing, replication etc. All while storage remains one of the lower margin offerings for the hyperscale clouds - they keep it cheap to attract high margin compute.
Now add to that the cost of building and maintaining the myriad of apps, APIs, integrations etc. for a consumer facing storage service and $2/mo for 100GB would be very very slightly profitable at best.
I needed about 20 GB of storage. Why the hell should I have to pay for 100 times that?
Since I switched, I've slowly grown to 30 GB, but I still have plenty of room before I need to go to the next tier and pay another $1/month.
Oh well, between Amazon syncing my photos as part of Prime and GDrive I have plenty of cloud storage for my needs.
I think I remember the tier prices being roughly the same since the service came out.
I get that salaries went up which adds to price, but over time it feels like storage price should go towards zero.
The answer is you're not really paying for the storage. You're paying for the servicing. The application with its network connectivity and data transfer, plus the overhead costs of billing and support when necessary.
The proposition may look like "$100 for 10 TB", but that's not a ratio that you can halve or whatever. It's $100 for 10 TB and all the network servicing and support apparatus, which doesn't change if the storage amount does.
It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a tier for less than 100/year, it's that they don't want to. We around HN know about reducing headaches by avoiding pathologically cheap customers. Dropbox makes more profit overall by getting some of the would-be cheapos to round up to 100/year and letting the rest walk.
If the software is already built, it would be the same dev cost to offer 50gb, or 10TB.
Sure there might be some customer support issues that don’t scale the same way, but then why not only offer customer support for higher tiers ?
When you have less scale, you need to charge a bit more for your initial level.