Amazon Prime Photos • Hacker News Board

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#11

Post by wspeirs » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:45 PM UTC

It's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much:

- Box: $180/year for unlimited (https://www.box.com/pricing/)

- Google: $120/year for 1TB (https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en)

- Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB (https://www.dropbox.com/pro)

- Amazon: $60/year for unlimited (https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/landing/everything/)

- Microsoft: $60/year for 1TB (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-office-36...)

They all offer approximately the same service, but from cheapest to priciest is almost 3x. I wonder how much sand is left in the hourglass for companies like Box & Dropbox? Also, how much longer will Google keep their price at $120/year for 1TB when Amazon is half that for unlimited storage? Also, does your average Joe even care when you get 15GB for free from Google?

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#12

Post by cmurf » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:47 PM UTC

JPEG only? Or Raw/DNG too?

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#13

Post by ausjke » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

time to ditch flickr then? as I have the prime membership at amazon? wish I can import flickr into amazon somehow.

on the other hand I hope they support client-side encryption so someone can only view the pictures after they're decrypted

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#14

Post by agildehaus » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:48 PM UTC

wspeirs wrote: post #11

It's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much: - Box: $180/year for unlimited ( https://www.box.com/pricing/ ) - Google: $120/year for 1TB ( https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en ) - Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB ( https://www.dropbox.com/pro ) - Amazon: $60/year for unlimited ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/land…

Absolutely none of these are "unlimited" storage. It's simply overselling.

Even the providers that are selling N terabytes for $Q are counting on a certain percentage of those users not utilizing that much. This is why the prices vary so wildly, because each provider is doing different math and hedging different bets.

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#15

Post by Veratyr » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:49 PM UTC

wspeirs wrote: post #11

It's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much: - Box: $180/year for unlimited ( https://www.box.com/pricing/ ) - Google: $120/year for 1TB ( https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en ) - Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB ( https://www.dropbox.com/pro ) - Amazon: $60/year for unlimited ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/land…

You used business pricing for Box, Dropbox and Microsoft but consumer pricing for Google. Google gives unlimited storage for $120/user/year as part of Apps for Work Unlimited: https://support.google.com/a/answer/6034782?hl=en

Also "offer approximately the same service" is a bit off. Amazon doesn't have any kind of SLA for Cloud Drive and while Box, Microsoft and Google provide SLAs. In addition, while the older competitors provide essentially a full office suite and a bunch of features like OCR, Amazon provides nothing but a very basic web interface that allows you to see previews.

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#16

Post by Veratyr » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:50 PM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #12

JPEG only? Or Raw/DNG too?

They support RAW files: https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=...

This makes it superior to Google Photos for backup in my opinion. Amazon provides free (with Prime) backup with no limits, RAW support and no recompression. Google Photos provides it for free but with lossy compression and without the possibility of retaining the range of RAW.

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#17

Post by ausjke » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:52 PM UTC

ausjke wrote: post #13

time to ditch flickr then? as I have the prime membership at amazon? wish I can import flickr into amazon somehow. on the other hand I hope they support client-side encryption so someone can only view the pictures after they're decrypted

how to define "picture", can I hide my files into some picture then upload it and essentially use amazon-picture-unlimited as an unlimited file storage?

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#18

Post by cmurf » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:54 PM UTC

wspeirs wrote: post #11

It's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much: - Box: $180/year for unlimited ( https://www.box.com/pricing/ ) - Google: $120/year for 1TB ( https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en ) - Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB ( https://www.dropbox.com/pro ) - Amazon: $60/year for unlimited ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/land…

The Amazon pricing is sufficiently cheap it probably comes with caveats similar to Glacier. Rather than as convoluted as Glacier they probably just have fixed retrieval amounts and rates, rather than the "get more or faster, pay more" Glacier sliding scale. Whereas Google is probably their nearline service. I have no idea what Microsoft's is. Backblaze also has $0.005/GB/mo which puts it in the $60/year for 1TB range using B2 Cloud service, but it's more like Google Nearline I think.

All of these have different retrieval rules and rates, so it's not just the annual.

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#19

Post by remremz » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:55 PM UTC

I just use Google Photos for backup which while is reduced in quality its enough for my needs. Best of all its unlimited storage and its free.

Re: Amazon Prime Photos

#20

Post by Veratyr » Tue, Dec 29, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

cmurf wrote: post #18

wspeirs wrote: post #11

It's clear that the cost of storage is approaching $0, but it's surprising to me that the price of these company's services vary so much: - Box: $180/year for unlimited ( https://www.box.com/pricing/ ) - Google: $120/year for 1TB ( https://support.google.com/drive/answer/2375123?hl=en ) - Dropbox: $100/year for 1TB ( https://www.dropbox.com/pro ) - Amazon: $60/year for unlimited ( https://www.amazon.com/gp/drive/land…

The Amazon pricing is sufficiently cheap it probably comes with caveats similar to Glacier. Rather than as convoluted as Glacier they probably just have fixed retrieval amounts and rates, rather than the "get more or faster, pay more" Glacier sliding scale. Whereas Google is probably their nearline service. I have no idea what Microsoft's is. Backblaze also has $0.005/GB/mo which puts it in the $60/year for 1TB range…

Many home users have managed to saturate their (unusually fast) connections sending/receiving to Amazon Cloud Drive: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/32oniv/so_how_...

And it doesn't have Glacier-like restrictions, at least in terms of retrieval delay. Nor does Backblaze. The difference with Backblaze is that it's only replicated within a single datacenter. If anything happens to that DC you're out of luck.