Amazon is discontinuing Drive, its cloud storage service that debuted over a decade ago.
The e-commerce giant announced in an email to Amazon Drive customers that it will discontinue support for the service at the end of next year in order to focus its efforts on photo and video storage through Amazon Photos.
Drive debuted in 2011 as Cloud Drive, a service billed as a virtual hard drive for storing music, photos, videos, documents, and other media. It launched with 5GB of free space, and MP3s purchased from Amazon did not count against a user’s quota.
Amazon launched an unlimited storage tier in 2015 for $60 per year, as well as an unlimited package just for photos for $12 per year.
The unlimited photos plan was only available to non-Prime members; those with a paid Prime membership already had unlimited image storage via Prime Photos.
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Amazon discontinued its unlimited plan in mid-2017, replacing it with two paid tiers.
The first provided 100GB of storage for $12 per year, while the second provided 1TB for the same $60 per year as the previous unlimited plan.
As part of Prime, Prime members now get unlimited full-resolution photo storage, 5GB of video storage, and free shipping on prints.
Existing Amazon Drive users should be aware that there is still time to act. The Amazon Drive app for Android and iOS will be available in their respective app stores until October 31, 2022, according to this FAQ.
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