It has not even been a year since Bitcasa announced new pricing plans and today they announced they are upgrading their storage infrastructure and killing off all Infinite storage plans. While I know little about what Bitcasa is actually doing to their storage infrastructure, they toss phrases around such as zero-knowledge, but the reality is what they started when Brian Taptich came on as CEO has now finally come. I was suprised the video embeded at the top of this post was still available on YouTube. I embedded it to start at 8 seconds so you can hear what Brian Taptich had to say a year ago about the new plans and how existing subscribers would get all new functionality at the existing price plan.
The reality is Infinite plan users that did stick it out with Bitcasa now have until November 15, 2014 to move all their data. People can either choose to migrate to one of the new Bitcasa plans (so much for keeping your original pricing) or you should perhaps start looking at downloading it all away from them. Bitcasa has stated on their blog post that “all accounts and data not transferred to the new system will be deleted on November 16, 2014.”
If you are still a Bitcasa Infinite user you will probably want to read this FAQ they have posted. If you cannot download all of your data from Bitcasa before November 16th, and if you have a lot of data combined with their incredibly slow speeds, you might want to look at Mover.io and their connectors to help move your data to a service that offers faster downloads.
I highly suggest you consider looking at an alternate cloud storage service. When my plan came due after they changed plans last year I simply dropped them. It was clear that Bitcasa does not know the meaning of customer loyalty and will do whatever they can to make an extra dollar. Not only that but they even took the extra time in their blog post to basically insult all of the still existing Infinite plan members.
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.
Considering there are a number of unlimited cloud backup services that do seem to be able to make a profit offering unlimited cloud backup Bitcasa seems content to blame their Infinite users for Bitcasa not making the Infinite plan work.
If you are an existing Bitcasa Infinite user you should login to your account an start the process to either switch to a new plan or leave (I highly suggest leaving). If you would like to express your feeling about this feel free to leave a comment or browse the user forum here. I would not be surprised if Bitcasa deleted the user forum at some point. They deleted the blog post about their pricing plan updates last year because of all the negative press.
Want to know more about Bitcasa? Read our complete Bitcasa review for more information.
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