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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

Only 1 free GB? That seems highly unlikely. But if it's true, I think it will be very disappointing.

That has to be a mistake. You already can upload more than 7 GB using Google Docs. It would be more in line with Google to offer 100 GB or 1 TB free and really blow away the competition. I wonder if they have considered what it would cost to offer 1 TB of storage vs. buying Dropbox. Most people would not use anything close to the maximum and of course the storage costs will get cheaper over time.

Google needs to give people a compelling reason to try out the service. Remember when GMail launched in 2004 and 1 GB of storage space for e-mail seemed crazy? I think Hotmail offered 4 MB of space at the time. You had to constantly delete old e-mails to keep below the quota. Storing files in the cloud is reaching a tipping point where it becomes mainstream. Google needs to get a foothold now if they want to be the leader in this product category.

There's no chance of Google offering 1TB free to everyone in the world. Even with just a small minority using their full allotment (there are plenty of warez hoarders, photographers, and video makers out there), the cost would quickly balloon into the hundreds of millions.

100GB is on the outer edge of plausibility. 10-20GB would be reasonable. One is definitely not enough.

Google has $44.6 billion in cash and short term investments at their disposal. Dropbox was recently valued at $4 billion. If Google could spend hundred of millions (or even a few billion) offering tons of storage space, you would have to think might consider doing so over doing something like trying to buy Dropbox. They would become the leader in the space almost overnight. At the very least, I would expect them to offer unlimited storage for movies and music purchased in the Google Play store (similar to Amazon).

With Googles new push to have all products making money it is unlikely that Google will sink too much money into offering free Drive space.

The article actually mentions 1Gb, or equivalently 128MB. I wouldn't really consider anything written there to be worth much.

I think that that is clearly a mistype. Google would not launch with the storage in gigabits.

Doesn't Gmail already offer over 7GB of storage for free? I would be amazed if they do not match Dropbox's 2GB free offering.

Regardless, Google storage is very cheap. 80GB for $20.

https://accounts.google.com/b/0/PurchaseStorage

I'm currently storing all my backups as tar.gz files on Google Docs and am even able to upload multiple-GB files via my browser.

I finally hit the space limit on Gmail and upgraded my storage, and I couldn't believe how cheap it was. $5 for an additional 20GB -- that's practically nothing.