If you’re here, you probably already have your own reasons for investigating S3, but for me it was a combination of cost (see below), wanting to learn more about how S3 works, and basically cutting out the middleman. Many of these services use Amazon S3, Amazon’s famous web storage service, part of Amazon Web Services. I could never imagine going back to the dark era of saving directly to the C drive, a time when one misplaced swing of your hard drive head could render your entire digital life erased forever.īut that’s not to say that Dropbox, or any of their rival clones like Google Drive or OneDrive, have to be the way forward. The ability to have files saved in the cloud, yet with the ease of use that comes with having them saved locally, is quite revolutionary. It’s all about growth for them, which makes Amazon every possible competitor’s worst nightmare.Dropbox is amazing. But even better, Amazon doesn’t earn meaningful profit margins on any of its lines of business so there’s no need for Cloud Drive to be any different.

How can Amazon afford to offer such crazy prices? Well, storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, and Amazon has achieved great scale and efficiency with operating large servers.

Apple tried and failed in an effort to purchase Dropbox several years ago, but I think in the long term the founders will end up wishing they’d sold. But it’s hard to see how the company can compete with Amazon rushing in, offering a superior free product, and cutting Dropbox’s prices in half. And I’m already paid up for a year, so I won’t be switching anytime soon.

You could get a 50GB account for $25 a year. And unlike Dropbox, Amazon offers intermediate options.

Then today I looked at the pricing for Amazon’s competing service. I like it so much that on Monday I upgraded from the 2GB free version to the one in which you get 100GB of storage.

Dropbox amazon