Bitcasa Ends Infinite Cloud Storage Plans Due to Low Demand

The company that has aimed to build its reputation partly on offering unlimited cloud storage for a flat monthly fee is abandoning its Infinite cloud storage subscription plans. Bitcasa noted in a blog post that lack of demand pushed them to end the service, although the blog also hinted at additional issues.

According to the blog, Bitcasa has spent the last year upgrading its infrastructure, and in doing so has discovered only 0.5 percent of accounts require more than 1TB of storage. Even fewer (0.1 percent) require more than 10TB of cloud storage space. So basically, few customers are actually taking advantage of the unlimited cloud storage offered via the Infinite service plans. 

That’s a fair assessment, and it makes good business sense to cut back or cut off cloud services that simply aren’t making enough money. But what’s really going on seems to go a bit deeper.

From the blog: “Also, the reality is while we have tried to make our vision of infinite work, the low demand combined with the growing number of suspected abusers, means that supporting an Infinite plan is not a viable business for us. Our Acceptable Use policy has been a challenge to enforce with our privacy features, as we can only see the amount of of data stored—which for some customers, is at a level that seems impossible for individual usage.”

It’s another casualty in the cloud storage wars. Not a fatality, mind you, but when a business presents a public-facing focus on “unlimited cloud storage,” the nixing of such services can do some damage. In this case, that damage is likely to be minor.

The closing of Bitcasa Infinite, which is scheduled to happen Nov. 15, follows almost a year after the company increased its unlimited cloud storage pricing by a factor of 10. As Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT, noted at the time, “I have to wonder if another contributor was a small percentage of clients storing very large volumes of data.” It appears King was right in his thinking, considering the musings by Bitcasa about the “growing number of suspected abusers.”

Customers using the Infinite plans have until Nov. 15 to migrate their data or lose it Nov. 16. Bitcasa is pushing customers toward its 1TB and 10TB cloud storage service plans.