Main image of article Which Cloud-Storage Option Is Cheapest?

Over at Technologizer, Harry McCracken has assembled a chart comparing the major cloud-storage services by price, mobile support and other metrics. For anyone debating whether to put massive amounts of data in the cloud, it’s a potentially useful breakdown of the options out there.

On a price-per-gigabyte basis, purchasing the Personal version Office 365 (Microsoft’s cloud-based version of Office) is the best option, as it comes with a terabyte of OneDrive storage for $6.99 per month; the Home version of Office 365, which allows up to five users, offers the same amount of storage for $9.99 per month. For those with zero interest in Office 365, the cheapest options include OneDrive by itself (roughly $1 per 50GB per month, up to 200GB) and Google Drive, which offers multiple storage options that break down to roughly 50 cents per 50GB per month.

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Dropbox, Box and the current pricing for Apple iCloud (the latter due to undergo a change with the release of iOS 8 later this year) are all the most expensive options on the list, at anywhere from $4.16 to $8.33 per 50GB per month.

The battle between tech companies over who gets to store customers’ cloud data has picked up in recent months. In March, Google announced that customers could purchase a terabyte of space on Google Drive for $9.99 a month. At the time, that seemed like a major shot across the bow of Dropbox, which charges $9.99 a month for 100GB, and Apple, where the price is $100 per year for 50GB. At the time, pundits suggested that Google’s aggressive price cuts—enabled by the company’s massive IT infrastructure—would kick off a new era in the cloud-storage wars, with prices for every major service plunging toward rock bottom.

Microsoft clearly wants to challenge Google on the pricing front, given its recent decision to slash storage costs for anyone who purchases Office 365. But if this race to the bottom between tech giants accelerates over the next few years, it could present some challenges for smaller cloud-storage vendors that don’t have billions of dollars and other platforms to leverage in the name of attracting customers.

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