Box introduces a cheaper plan to target more small businesses as it doubles its personal storage

On Wednesday, cloud storage service Box unveiled a new pricing structure that it believes will make it more accessible (and appealing) to individuals and small to medium sized businesses. As part of this move, the Personal plan now has 10GB of free storage, twice the original amount. In addition, Box has added a Starter plan that offers 100GB for just $5 per user.

For small businesses, leveraging enterprise-level technology like Oracle, Siebel, IBM, SAP, and Microsoft’s SharePoint Server can be out of reach — it’s too expensive, difficult to manage and use, and has enormous upfront costs. So when there’s a need to share files and collaborate, what’s a SMB to do? Box believes the cloud is the answer.

Company Chief Operating Officer Dan Levin tells us that, according to a Gartner study, for SMBs, the cloud has become the driving force enabling businesses to have access to capabilities that weren’t widely accessible before. This opens up doors for the likes of Netsuite, Zendesk, Salesforce, GoodData, and of course, Box.

It’s no surprise that Box is trying to reach out to more SMBs — many of its 180,000 customer companies are in this category. Aaron Levie, its CEO says, “More than ever before, the economy today is driven by information and collaboration. Whether you’re a global corporation, a small business, or a freelancer, the key to competing is being able to securely share, manage, and access your content anywhere, on any device.”

Here are new pricing tiers for Box:

• Personal: Free and users now get a total of 10GB of free storage.
  
• Starter: Available for $5 per month, a company gets 100GB of pooled storage and a 2GB file size limit to make it easy for SMBs and small teams of up to 10 users get started on Box.
• Business: Still priced at $15 per user per month, this plan offers 1,000GB of storage and a 5GB file size limit.
• Enterprise: For $35 per user per month, Box customers receive unlimited storage and a 5GB file size limit, along with other perks.
• Elite: Pricing available upon request.

Doubling the amount of storage space for its Personal accounts gives Box a bit more leverage over competitors like Dropbox and Hightail. The only service that it doesn’t trump is Google Drive, which offers 15GB of free space. Technically, Dropbox also rivals Box’s storage limit if you account for adding in the various referral bonuses and linking to other accounts like Mailbox.

With Box’s new plan, the company hopes that it can attract new users and also convert businesses into operating solely through the cloud.

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