Also "offer approximately the same service" is a bit off. Amazon doesn't have any kind of SLA for Cloud Drive and while Box, Microsoft and Google provide SLAs. In addition, while the older competitors provide essentially a full office suite and a bunch of features like OCR, Amazon provides nothing but a very basic web interface that allows you to see previews.

https://www.dropbox.com/business/pricing

(nb: used to work there)

Also the business plans are theoretically limited to 1TB per users for organizations with less than 5 users. I'm not sure if that's still the case since I seem to have actual unlimited (2TB use now) with a single user organization.

Even the providers that are selling N terabytes for $Q are counting on a certain percentage of those users not utilizing that much. This is why the prices vary so wildly, because each provider is doing different math and hedging different bets.

More specifically, they each have their own unique business model which they believe will perform best in the market. You can "oversell" future storage successfully if you know the usage growth rates.

So no desktop sync, only manual uploads and downloads.

However, there are 3rd-party options for this:

• Arq: https://www.arqbackup.com/

• odrive: https://www.odrive.com/amazon

• Synology Cloud Sync: http://www.macdrifter.com/2015/06/synology-cloud-sync-adds-a...

All of these have different retrieval rules and rates, so it's not just the annual.

And it doesn't have Glacier-like restrictions, at least in terms of retrieval delay. Nor does Backblaze. The difference with Backblaze is that it's only replicated within a single datacenter. If anything happens to that DC you're out of luck.

With these patterns, you can make a system that puts everything on S3 at first, makes thumbnails and starts moving most things to glacier based on access patterns.

Unfortunately, no such system yet exists and the complexities of dealing with many people's libraries (particularly regarding RAW files) make it more difficult than it seems (I've looked at doing this myself in the past).

I am pretty sure cloud drive is available outside the US.

Not sure what you mean there, but for me, 15G is plenty (but then, it's mostly just going to email storage).

I'm ok with that for things I don't care too much about losing, but my photos are precious to me, so I'll keep them with a company whose main business is not losing my stuff. Dropbox has one job, and so far they have consistently acted like they know it.

So I guess both try to attract pro users with low cost.