Microsoft is expanding OneDrive storage for paying customers, either as part of an Office 365 plan or paying separately.
Office 365 Home, Personal and other plans already include a Terabyte of OneDrive cloud storage per user.
Now it’s possible to expand beyond 1TB online storage, for a monthly fee, up to 2TB.
Additional storage is available in 200GB increments. All monthly prices in US dollars before taxes.
- 1TB included with Office 365 plans
- 1.2TB (200GB more) $1.99
- 1.4TB (400GB more) $3.99
- 1.6TB (600GB more) $5.99
- 1.8TB (800GB more) $7.99
- 2TB (1TB extra) $9.99 a month
Source: Microsoft
Good value?
OneDrive storage extras work out to 12 cents per GB a year which is about the current standard charge for general cloud storage. Dropbox is cheaper (around 6 cents per GB/year). There are cheaper options for photo / video storage too.
It’s convenient to have a single online store but there are downsides like reliability and trusting all your online storage to a single provider. There’s a lot to be said for spreading the risk across multiple providers so that a failure of one cloud store doesn’t affect all your data.
More than a few Office 365 Home customers already have more than a 1TB of storage at no extra charge. Office 365 Home has 1TB OneDrive for each of the 6 users who can share the plan. Savvy customers setup another ‘user’ (email address) for their Home plan and use that 1TB quota. That takes a little tech trickery but it’s possible, despite being a breach of the spirit (maybe the letter) of the Office 365 license.
OneDrive standalone quota doubles
The standalone (ie no Office 365 plan) price for OneDrive storage only is now $1.99 a month for 100GB. That’s double the current 50GB for the same price.
100GB for US$23.88 plus tax a year is almost 24 cents per GB which is a high price compared to the many other cloud providers out there. Google One and Apple iCloud both have cheaper 100GB plans.
OneDrive Free quota
OneDrive’s free allowance for all Microsoft account holders remains unchanged at 5GB.
