Verizon wants to back up your entire life for $13.99 per month

Verizon’s cloud storage options are growing: today the company unveiled a new individual plan for its unlimited storage tier. It’s an add-on available for existing Verizon subscribers and costs $13.99 per month. It is — I’ll repeat — unlimited, so you can upload all the photos, videos, documents, PDFs, and PNGs that your heart desires, from your phone and your computer. That’s an unusual offering when most other cloud storage services come with data caps, but this is a wireless carrier after all, so it’s worth considering a couple of words of caution.

Carriers, including Verizon, often have funny definitions of “unlimited,” and there are indeed a few limitations. Individual files can’t exceed 10GB, and you can only upload 50GB per day. Still, those are some high ceilings that most people wouldn’t come close to hitting. Verizon will continue to offer its group unlimited plan for $19.99 per month for up to five people, who each get their own cloud storage account.

Verizon’s unlimited plan is particularly compelling at a time when such options are scarce: Dropbox just eliminated its unlimited plan for business customers, and consumer options like Google One max out at 2TB. Services like Backblaze offer unlimited backups for your computer, but they’re designed to be a safeguard in case your hard drive fails — not as a media storage solution. If you’re looking for a long-term solution for photos and videos that you’ll want to access from anywhere, unlimited is awfully appealing.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that Verizon won’t engage in some classic carrier chicanery, like forcing you to move to a higher-priced plan in order to take a “free” phone deal — or eliminating the option altogether in the future. If that happens, you can either grumble about it and pay up — my personal favorite approach — or download your files to your computer and take them elsewhere.