Rapidshare changes subscription plans once again
Maybe it is just me, but it appears to me that Rapidshare is changing subscription plans and the site itself every six months or so.
The company announced new subscription plans back in March 2013 causing quite the uproar in the community as it dropped the unlimited storage plan in the process that it offered previously.
Only 250 Gigabyte and 500 Gigabyte plans were offered as part of the new options for roughly $10 and $20 respectively per month with additional storage being provided for more money up to a total of 4 Terabytes of storage space.
Two months later it became known that the company had to lay off 75% of its workforce. Signs that Rapidshare was struggling were visible before that time and confirmed by the lay offs.
Alexa for instance saw a decline of Rapidshare's traffic rank from a coveted top 100 spot to barely making it in the top 1000 in less than a year's time.
On September 13, 2013, Rapidshare announced that it had once again made changes to the subscription plans offered by the service, and also changed the site's look and feel in the process.
The company tries to position itself in the personal file storage market, as far away as possible from its file sharing roots. All users receive 10 Gigabyte of free storage on Rapidshare. The paid plans have been raised by 50 and 200 Gigabyte respectively.
The 300 Gigabyte plan starts at 8.21€ per month while the 700 Gigabyte plan is available from 16.43€ per month. Standard accounts have a transfer limit of 100 Megabytes per day, while the other two account types one of 10 Gigabytes and 40 Gigabytes respectively per day.
The new interface displays the files that you have uploaded to Rapidshare in a table-like structure on top. You can use the upload button to upload new files to the service, or share to make files publicly available instead.
Rapidshare users can furthermore make use of the desktop client for Windows or OS X that the company makes available to manage their account from their desktop.
The company announced plans to improve the sharing feature soon by introducing new options such as password protection or time-limited sharing to it.
Closing Words
Rapidshare is not the only file hoster that is seeing a drop in traffic. Even popular services such as Mediafire have experienced a drop, albeit less drastically, in the past year. Some like Mega have surged on the other hand, and it is likely that this played a part in the drop of other services.
Regular file synchronization services like Dropbox or OneDrive likely played their part as well, as they have become more readily available and improved their services significantly in recent time.
The redesign is not radical enough in my opinion to stop the user exodus. What's your take on this?
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It seems RapidShare is determined to kill its business completely.
They have just announced they will be getting rid of the standard account completely and upping the price of their other accounts significantly in Oct 2013 it cost 99.99 euros for a 12 months standard-plus account, now they want 49.99 euro/month = 599.99 for 12 months.
A 500% price increase.
Good Bye RapidShare.
These days even a 500mb file is considered relatively small. To limit data transfer to 100mb is just pathetic. RS must as well be converted into a subscription-only file host. Please don’t insult our intelligence, RS.
I believe I’ve said it before, but why would anyone use a paid file sharing service with limits?
That’s just insane, I can’t believe they’re still in business.
Rapidshare’s main problem is that they have not altered their business model when services such as Dropbox or the new Mega came along. Plus, they get more “flak” than others from German courts and have to comply with ridiculous monitoring terms.
And don’t wonder if they change it again. Limits on transfers suck. 100MB a day? You’ve got to be joking. This is 2013 rapidshare.
The most likely reason this is implemented is to prevent the sharing of “a lot of” copyrighted files using free accounts. While I was not able to find information about it, I assume that the owner is exempt from that limit.
I hope you’re right about the owner, a 100mb limit would prevent any type of media sharing at all. Rendering the service as little more than a clipboard.
I have just tested it, and you can download files larger than 100 Megabytes from your account.