Amazon is killing off one of the best deals in cloud storage for people who need to back up a lot of data. Starting today, customers can no longer get unlimited cloud storage for $60 a year. Instead they will have to chose between two paid tiers: up to 100GB for $11.99 a year or up to 1TB for $60 a year, with each additional TB costing an additional $59.99 annually up to a maximum of 30TB.
That's still the best deal for backing up 1TB of data to the cloud and is matched to Apple's recently upgraded 2TB iCloud plan for $119.98 per year. Anyone who signs up for Amazon Drive will still get 5GB for free, and if you are a Prime subscriber, you still get unlimited photo storage as part of your membership.
Amazon introduced the deal in 2015 as part of a campaign to lure users from rival cloud services like Dropbox and Google Drive, but unlimited storage is not sustainable over time.
Current unlimited storage customers will keep their existing plan through its expiration date. After this, customers with auto-renew turned on and 1TB or less of data stored will be renewed into the 1TB plan for $59.99 per year. Customers with auto-renew off, or who have more than 1TB of data stored, will need to visit their account's Manage Storage page to opt in to one of the new plans.
On the other hand, those who are using more than 1TB of storage and don't want to start paying for more than that will have 180 days to download or delete their data. After that, Amazon will start deleting content for them starting with most recent uploads until the account falls within the new limits.