The offers of unlimited cloud storage for business users are slowly disappearing. The latest to ditch these plans is Microsoft, which is no longer offering an option for new customers to sign up for a OneDrive for Business plan that previously included unlimited storage for subscribers.
Microsoft"s website which shows the company"s cloud storage plans for business now only shows one stand-alone option, OneDrive for Business (Plan 1), which is priced at $5 a month per user, and offers up to 1TB of cloud storage, with the option to go up to 5TB depending on the number of users. It also offers 1TB of storage per user for its two Microsoft 365 Business plans.
Previously, the company had another option, OneDrive for Business (Plan 2), that offered unlimited storage per user for $10 a month, if businesses qualified for that option. That particular plan, according to TechRadar, was quietly removed sometime in mid-July.
When asked for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson sent TechRadar this statement, which didn"t directly confirm the shutdown of OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) but did confirm it has made some changes to its OneDrive offerings:
In response to customer demand, Microsoft has streamlined the purchasing process for customers who use OneDrive for Business standalone plans. Customers currently on these plans will still be able to add seats and renew their license.
That seems to suggest that current OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) subscribers with unlimited storage will be able to keep using the plan under those conditions, at least for the time being. However, new subscribers are out of luck.
Microsoft"s statement about streamlining its OneDrive plans "in response to customer demand" is pretty vague. We do wonder if there simply wasn"t enough support for OneDrive for Business (Plan 2) to keep it going, or if something else is going on.
Last week, Dropbox announced it was ditching its unlimited cloud storage plans for businesses, with the company claiming many of its customers abused those privileges for things other than file storage.