Today Apple debuted iCloud.com in beta. Unfortunately you can only access it if you are an Apple Developer and not just the free kind. Along with the launch of iCloud came details about pricing for end users of the service.
The short version of iCloud pricing is this. All users get 5GB free. Adding an additional 10GB (to bring your total to 15GB) will cost $20/year. Pushing the total storage to 25GB will run $40/year. The top tier will net you 55GB of storage for a cool $100/year.
It's interesting to compare Apple's offerings with what's already out there in the cloud storage space. With iCloud any images stored and synced with Photo Stream will not count towards your storage total. So as long as you manage your images the iCloud way you get free storage for images. Amazon offers free storage for music purchased through their store for free plan users (which is also 5GB of storage) and unlimited music storage for any of their paid plans.
Amazon has more pricing options as well with a top tier of 1000GB for $1000/year but their lower offers are on par with Apple's. Amazon gives you 20GB of storage for $20/year, 50GB for $50/year, and 100GB for $100/year. Amazon always works out to a dollar per GB per year. Not too shabby.
Both Amazon and Apple are making Dropbox look a little bit expensive in comparison. Dropbox is only giving 2GB of storage for free and the plans are priced monthly. For $9.99/month you get 50GB and $19.99/month gets you 100GB. The thing iCloud gives that no one else is offering is a suite of apps to go along with iCloud service. Apple's service looks like it will let users view iWork documents stored in the cloud, manage their mail, calendar, contacts, and use Find my iPhone all through the online portal. Those are very slick additions to a bunch of storage.
If you are an Apple Developer you should go over and see if you can access the iCloud beta. Definitely worth checking out to see if the service is something appealing. Are you using cloud storage? Are you holding out for Apple or have you been happily using another service? Tell us in the comments.
