Dropbox Challenges Google And Amazon In The Cloud By Slashing Its Prices

Dropbox is making its service for Pro customers much cheaper, simpler, and better across the board, in a move announced Wednesday that's sure to irritate Google.

Dropbox effectively consolidated its three Pro account plans - which previously offered 100GB, 200GB, and 500GB of storage for $9.99, $19.99, and $49.99, respectively - into one single plan: $9.99 a month for 1 terabyte of storage.

Google also charges $9.99 for a terabyte of storage in its Drive cloud system.

Dropbox's new Pro plan also offers a few collaboration features, including "view-only" permissions, which is helpful for freelancers and contractors that want to show mockups to their clients without letting them make any changes.

Dropbox Pro also lets users password-protect their links to any folders or documents, and even apply expiration dates to those items. As PCWorld's Zach Miners points out, this would be useful for wedding photographers that only want to allow access to a particular album of photos for a limited time.

Finally, Dropbox Pro will also let you delete any Dropbox files from a lost or stolen device while keeping those same files backed up in Dropbox's cloud, which will be a relief for many who have ever worried about losing sensitive data on a misplaced device.

While Dropbox's Pro service is now significantly cheaper than it once was, the company is also trying to keep up with Google and Amazon, two giant cloud companies that continue to slash their prices. Google and Amazon both dropped prices for their respective cloud services in March - Google offers customers 15 GB of storage per month for free, while Amazon charges $0.03 per GB per month for its S3 cloud service, which is a favorite among developers (Dropbox included).

Dropbox, Google and Amazon driving down their prices for cloud services will hopefully result in more companies like Microsoft and Apple doing the same; both companies' cloud platforms offer less space for more money each month. But with more cheap cloud services, we could see greater adoption rates push companies to focus on optimizing their infrastructure in the cloud. Cloud computing is already outpacing traditional data workloads, but cheaper prices will help the public cloud get ever closer to becoming the norm for all our storage needs.

Disclosure: Jeff Bezos is an investor in Business Insider through his personal investment company Bezos Expeditions.