Firefly a Cartoon is looking at family photos and videos in their mobile phone. They are worried abo.jpg

In today’s phone usage, with photos and videos being shot every day, users are quickly running out of space in their Google Photos/Drive accounts as well as on their 64 or 128 GB phones.

Although Google offers 15GB of free storage, users quickly exhaust it and have to resort to taking backups on pen drives or hard drives, which are unreliable and inconvenient. On the other hand, upgrading to the 200 GB plan for $3 per month buys some time, but users may soon run out of that storage space as well.

If you upgrade to the 2TB plan on Google, the cost quickly escalates to $10 per month, which feels prohibitive for many users.

Google Storage per GB S3 Pricing
15GB Free 0
200 GB Monthly plan 2.99$/month 1.5c per GB Archive Instant Access Tier, All Storage / Month 0.4c per GB
2TB 9.99$/month 0.5c per GB Archive Instant Access Tier, All Storage / Month 0.4c per GB

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I wonder if there is an opportunity to provide a per GB use plan relying on a low cost storage (infrequent access tier or intelligent access tier) and provide a permanent solution to this problem.

Let’s consider a user who needs 500GB of storage.

Google One S3
Cost 10$ / month 2$ / month
Pros 1. Convenient
  1. Fast access | 1. Low cost | | Cons | 1. High cost | 1. Inconvenient - Needs to manage storing in-frequent data in S3 or other cloud. |

A cost saving approach

Have an mobile app that provides a mechanism for users to select large items and move them to a cold storage which can be fetched on demand back on to their Phone or Google Photos app.