Google Drive: annual payment discounts added
If you are a paying Google Drive customer you know that Google offered monthly payment options only up until now.
The company is giving away 15 Gigabyte of storage to all its users, but requires you to pay a subscription fee if you require more than that amount of data storage.
The storage is shared across several Google services, not just google Drive. It is also used by the email service Gmail, and by Google Photos.
This meant up until now that you paid Google $1.99 per month for 100 Gigabyte of storage, or $9.99 for 1 Terabyte. The available storage quotas go up to 30 Terabyte of storage for $299.99 per month.
Note that Dollar and Euro pricing appears to be identical.
If you visit Google's Storage page right now on the official company website, you will notice that annual plans have been added for some storage tiers.
The 100 Gigabyte plan is still available for $1.99 per month, but now also for $19.99 a year. If you'd pay the monthly price for a year, you'd end up paying $23.88 in total. Paying the annual subscription fee of $19.99 saves you about 16% of the total price.
The 1 Terabyte plan is available for $9.99 per month, or for a one-time payment of $99.99 per year. If you subscribe to the plan for a year and pay monthly, you end up paying $119.88. Paying annually for the subscription saves you about 17% of the total sum.
Annual payment options are only available for the 100 Gigabyte and 1 Terabyte storage plans. They are not available for the 10, 20 and 30 Terabyte plans which are still only available as monthly paid subscriptions.
The discounts are not huge, but you will still save money provided that you know that you will be a subscriber a year from the day you made the annual payment for the desired plan.
Monthly payments give you more flexibility when it comes to canceling the plan, as you won't lose money doing so.
The Google Drive storage plans & pricing support page has not been updated yet. It does not list the annual payment option at all. Also, Google Apps customers won't see the new annual pricing options either right now but it seems likely that the option will be made available to Google Apps customers as well.
Comparison
Google Drive storage has been quite expensive when compared to 1 Terabyte plans of other providers. Dropbox customers pay $99 annually for the 1 Terabyte Pro plan for instance, and Microsoft OneDrive customers $6.99 per month and they get Office 365 on top of that with that plan.
The annual payment option moves Google Drive storage pricing closer to Dropbox's level, but not to Microsoft's.
Now You: Do you pay for extra storage? If so, how much, where and what do you get for that?
Amazon Cloud Drive Unlimited @ https://smile.amazon.com/gp/drive/landing/everything for $59.99 a year is a way better deal.
And 3 full months as a trial for FREE right now too.
But yea good to see google reducing yearly rates. About damn time.
But still not good enough. 1TB should be $2.50 a month and unlimited should be $5 a month or $59.99 a year to match Amazon.
Office365 suite is a far better deal for what you get, and cheaper, even after these discounts.
Their client applications really need an overhaul.
The windows one keeps failing on synchronizing and gives me a grayed out context menu, the android one is really laggy on my nexus 5 than any other apps.
“available for the 100 Megabyte and 1 Terabyte storage plans”
The first one won’t last long! :-)
Adam, haha, so true ;)