Google Slashes Drive Prices, Improves Infrastructure

Google (GOOG) on Thursday said it’s slashing the pricing of its monthly plans for Google Drive to make the well-known storage platform more affordable to its users.

The new pricing plans are as follows: $1.99 for 100 gigabytes (previously $4.99), $9.99 for 1 terabyte (previously $49.99) and $99.99 for 10 terabytes and up. Users can still snag 15 gigabytes from Google for free.

Google Product Management Director Scott Johnston said in a blog post that “a number of recent infrastructure improvements” enabled the tech giant to make these cuts.

Cuts in price for cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) storage platforms are common in the industry. For example, Microsoft (MSFT) back in January reduced the pricing of its cloud-based storage to counter price reductions announced by Amazon (AMZN) Web Services (AWS).

Google this week also announced add-ons for Docs and Sheets — tools that can be accessed via an add-on menu within the doc itself that leads the user to a store.

Adds-ons are now available in the developer-preview phase, but the tools and APIs are available to everyone.

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