[TECH NEWS] Google slashes Drive prices by up to 80%

Google yesterday announced that prices of its fixed monthly data storage plans for its Drive service have been cut by as much as 80%.  The price for 100GB of capacity dropped from $4.99 to $1.99; the price for 1TB of capacity plummeted from $49.99 to $9.99; and the service is now offering 10TB of storage for $99.99.

Scott Johnston, a director of Google product management, said in a post on Google's blog site that the prices were cut due to "a number of recent infrastructure improvements".

Last year, Google tripled the amount of free space from 5GB to 15GB. Among Google Drive's competitors is Microsoft's OneDrive and Apple's iCloud, but the companies most threatened by Google's move into online storage two years ago are smaller specialized service providers, such as DropBox, Box, SugarSync and YouSendIt.

Google's new prices now undercut those of competitors. For example, Dropbox offers 2GB for free and charges $9.99 a month for 100GB. OneDrive offers 7GB of free storage, and charges $25 per year for 50GB of storage and $50 for 100GB.

Google Drive will continue to offer an initial 15GB of storage capacity at no charge.