Dropbox cuts cloud storage prices to match Google

The ongoing price war in the consumer cloud storage market has heated up after Dropbox today announced it would slash the cost of its Pro plan and upgrade users to 1TB of space.

The company said it would consolidate its three existing Pro account plans - which previously offered customers the choice of 100GB, 200GB or 500GB of storage for US$9.99, US$19.99 and US$49.99 a month - into one at US$9.99 (A$10.99 for Australian users) per month, that offers 1TB of online storage.

The Pro plan sits in between Dropbox's Basic and Business offerings and is targeted at professionals who require more storage than the base-level plan but don't need the enterprise-grade features offered by the Business plan.

The price cut brings the cost of Dropbox's offering in line with the US$9.99 Google charges for its 1TB Drive plan.

Dropbox has also introduced a number of new features in the consolidated Pro plan, including view-only permission and password protection (which can be given an expiry date) for shared folders and documents; and the ability to delete files from a lost or stolen device while keeping them backed up in Dropbox's cloud.

Dropbox and its rivals in the cloud storage space - specifically Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google - have been engaged in an ongoing price war which saw Google cut the price of its Drive storage to US$10 earlier this year, with AWS and Microsoft following suit shortly after.

AWS last month moved to once again undercut its rivals by debuting an enterprise-grade service, called Zocalo.

The AWS service offers cheaper prices than Dropbox and Box, with similar enterprise features to Google's Drive for Work and Microsoft's OneDrive for Business, starting at US$5 per enterprise user per month for 200GB storage. The first extra 1 terabyte (TB) per month costs US$0.03 per additional GB.