Upthere, a little-known startup founded by former Apple software gurus, thinks it can do far better than Apple iCloud, Dropbox, Box, and others when it comes to quickly storing, organizing, and searching digital photos, videos, and more.
This new company was co-founded by Bertrand Serlet, the former Senior Vice President of Software Engineering at Apple. This is going to be really fun to watch. I would not count these guys out.
Competition is good.
Sadly the article was a bit short on any solid data. I do like the bit about them building their own cloud infrastructure right down to their own hardware. That’s a serious play. I had to laugh a bit when Barb said not using AWS was perhaps controversial. As I write this I just got the Beta notification from Upthere so hopefully i’ll be able to check it soon. For me a solution that would work better than iCloud/Dropbox would be
l8er
PLEASE make it work!!
I have been beta testing Upthere since late last year. I like the product’s technology and potential it brings.
But sadly, its first generation product isn’t differencing itself enough (at least from end user’s point of view) from the likes of Dropbox and iCloud.
And it depends entirely on search. My wife runs a small business and she uses Dropbox to store spreadsheets, forms, scanned documents, and receipts. With Upthere, everything is just mashed together. No folders. No tagging. No label. Just search.
Ultimately, however, the main problem is pricing. For one thing, there’s no free tier. Upthere costs $4.99/month for 200GB and $1.99 for each additional 100GB (or $20.91/month for 1TB). While I applaud pay-as-much-as-you-need pricing, these prices are very high compared to Dropbox ($8.25/month for 1TB) and iCloud ($0.99/month for 50GB, $2.99 for 200GB, $9.99/month for 1TB).
4.99 is a little steep for a new company with no track record of staying in business for longer than 5 years.
I like everything about this product, except the price. If I only needed a terabyte of space, I’d probably be happy with under $21 a month. But I would need something closer to 6 to 8 terabytes. Not gonna cut it.
And the only thing I think would be better than this would be to move the cloud storage to my own Mac with 20TB of space, and then it becomes the cloud for all my other devices/Macs. DownHere might be a good name for it. It keeps my files synced without charging me anything in terms of storage space. How about charge for the throughput instead of storage space?
They have been doing this since 2012. Still working on it? That’s not expedient in today’s world. Having said that, Serlet has serious chops.
Especially in this arena.