The 'Cloud storage' business model is simply
a) get all your data
b) make it hard to move it elsewhere
c) profit!
Operating a large storage infrastructure is not free of course so it almost cannot be any other way unless everyone decided all at once "hey I'm going to charge what I need to stay in business forever right from the start." Which no one ever does because who signs up for such an expensive cloud storage plan where there are so many cheaper ones to choose from?
I pitched a psuedo peer to peer storage plan to some investors once (feel free to pick up the torch and keep running :-) where the company would 'sell' a NAS box to customers that they put on their network and the Internet. 50% of the available storage would be theirs to use, 50% would be used by people off site. The NAS box would encrypt peer-to-peer erasure coded copies of the local storage. If you're allocation of storage was 10TB you "got" 10TB of which the most up to date copy was on your 'home' NAS but it kept the 'cloud view' consistent within a few seconds if you had a decent network.
There was a variant where you took less than 50% of the storage and the company would sell the extra to people on a subscription basis and offset the cost of the NAS appliance you had in your house/apt whatever. The 'key value' of the company was this virtual datacenter where all of its gear was distributed amongst all of these individual installations. That needed some interesting capabilities like ship on warn replacement drives to owners etc.
As the available bandwidth to individual houses increases it gets to be a better idea.
Symform is the company that did this and I loved their model. Sadly, they went out of business. The idea of backing up your data across 38 peers, encrypted, instead of a central cloud storage service was enticing. Especially nice was that you didn't need to pay because you "paid" by also donating local storage. It's a great idea that hasn't taken off yet, not in any way comparable to Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, and others. It's frustrating because "paying" for cloud storage by giving up unused local storage seems like a great alternative.
Operating a large storage infrastructure is not free of course so it almost cannot be any other way unless everyone decided all at once "hey I'm going to charge what I need to stay in business forever right from the start." Which no one ever does because who signs up for such an expensive cloud storage plan where there are so many cheaper ones to choose from?
I pitched a psuedo peer to peer storage plan to some investors once (feel free to pick up the torch and keep running :-) where the company would 'sell' a NAS box to customers that they put on their network and the Internet. 50% of the available storage would be theirs to use, 50% would be used by people off site. The NAS box would encrypt peer-to-peer erasure coded copies of the local storage. If you're allocation of storage was 10TB you "got" 10TB of which the most up to date copy was on your 'home' NAS but it kept the 'cloud view' consistent within a few seconds if you had a decent network.
There was a variant where you took less than 50% of the storage and the company would sell the extra to people on a subscription basis and offset the cost of the NAS appliance you had in your house/apt whatever. The 'key value' of the company was this virtual datacenter where all of its gear was distributed amongst all of these individual installations. That needed some interesting capabilities like ship on warn replacement drives to owners etc.
As the available bandwidth to individual houses increases it gets to be a better idea.