Goodbye Rapidshare: shuts down free offer, increases pricing
Rapidshare was once one of the most popular file hosting websites in the world. It started to go downhill a couple of years ago when the company changed its business model significantly to a file owner paid hosting model.
While that was beneficial to users who only downloaded from the file hosting site, it limited paying customers to a certain transfer ratio per day.
Since download limits were removed, incentives to sign up for a paid account to improve download performance on Rapidshare or download more than a certain amount of data became non-issues.
Affiliates promoted Rapidshare prior to the change to downloaders who wanted to avoid slow downloads and bandwidth limitations. With the incentive gone, many turned to other file hosting services instead.
Less than a year later, Rapidshare announced that it would drop the unlimited storage plan that it had offered previously. Users who were over the limit suddenly faced the decision to pay a lot of money for their data storage, or turn to different hosting providers instead.
Then two months later news of layoffs made the round and things went downhill ever since. The last subscription plan change was announced September 2013 and things went quiet afterwards.
A notification is displayed to Rapidshare users who visit the website as of today. Rapidshare notifies its customers that it made the decision to terminate standard plans completely on the site
In addition to shutting down the standard plan as of July 1, 2014, it announced the pricing of the two plans it will offer in the future:
- Standard Plus for €49.99 per month
- Premium for €99.99 per month
Last year, accounts were available for €8.21 and €16.43 per month respectively which means that account prices have been increased by the factor six.
It is not clear if they will provide the same benefits as the old accounts, or if storage capacities or bandwidth per day has been increased as part of the price increase.
The offering page highlights the same storage capacities and the new prices which is a strong indicator that Rapidshare increased the price for each paid account type but kept everything else as is.
The company recommends that free users upgrade their account to a paid account, or backup the data that they have stored on Rapidshare prior to July 1, 2014. Rapidshare did not mention what it plans to do with data uploaded by free account users after July 1. It is however very likely that it will be deleted.
Closing Word
The removal of the free account option may make sense from a business perspective. But a price increase by the factor six is surely going to cause a mass exodus by existing users of the service.
While I have no information about Rapidshare's financials, it appears likely that the majority of paying users will shut down their account and migrate to another file hosting company instead.
Considering that you get 10 Terabyte of storage on Google Drive for the price of Rapidshare's Premium account, it is almost certain that a lot of users will move their data to other companies
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.