No More Free Online Backup at Wuala

Wuala has published this notice on June 2014:

Termination of free storage and storage promotion

This notice contains important information about the status and data on your Wuala account.

If you use free Wuala storage, please read this notice carefully.

From the time we created Wuala in 2007, the number of free cloud storage providers has continued to grow. As a result of this evolution and increasing costs, we are today announcing that Wuala will focus on paid accounts and enterprise storage services to be able to keep our service running.

Therefore, we are providing you with notice that effective December 31, 2014, we will be terminating all existing free storage.

There will be no change to the free storage included with paid Wuala Personal accounts and no change to user accounts of Wuala Business customers with free Wuala Personal storage.

We’ll continue to offer you your free storage until December 31, 2014, to give you time to either choose a paid plan or look for an alternative.

If you want to continue using Wuala:

If you have a free account and would like to convert to a paid account, you can easily do so by visiting http://wuala.com/purchase/storage and choosing an appropriate storage plan. We also offer a reasonable priced 5GB plan and all plans are available on a month to month basis without notice period (you can simply cancel your subscription before the next month gets billed).
Promotion (your plans only): If you choose a yearly plan (recurring or one-off) we’ll doucle all purchases until December 31, 2014.

After your purchase, you’ll receive a promo code with the same amount of storage for free (you can use it yourself to double your storage or you can give it away to someone else). Example: You buy 100GB and you get an extra 100GB free for one year.

If you do not want to continue using Wuala, please download your data from Wuala before December 31, 2014 and back it up to your PC, Mac, external HDD or another cloud storage provider.

Important: After December 31, 2014, you will not have access to your data and we will start to permanently delete data in free storage accounts. Please backup and download your data before that date.

Thank you for your understanding and for using Wuala.

Sincerely,

Your Wuala team

Comments

Wuala is a secure online file storage, file synchronization and backup service created in 2007 and originally developed by Caleido, Inc.

The Swiss company was acquired by LaCie in 2009 for $10 million, this later being bought by Seagate in 2012 for $186 million. The idea of LaCie was to buy a cloud storage provider to complement its offering of external storage devices with its own online backup service and not to be obliged to go through an external company as before.

An earlier version also supported distributed storage on other users' machines. This innovative technology was a way for Wuala to reduce its own storage infrastructure by offering users to store other users' data on their own HDD in exchange of free backup capacity of the same amount. However this feature, also offered by few other companies, was not successful and has been dropped. Would you like to have your HDD filled with information and from people that you know nothing about them?

In this over-saturated market, it's the war since the beginning with today more than 2,300 companies in the world, with their services available from anyone in the world. It explains why we think that a very limited number of these vendors are profitable if you don't consider those who had already a big storage infrastructure, especially Web service providers or huge entities like Amazon, Apple, Google and Microsoft. About no one published its financial results on its online backup activity alone. Box never was profitable since its inception and already some vendors have disappeared or have been acquired in an industry that needs a huge consolidation. Also most recently Bitcasa officially announced on its blog that it is officially killing off its unlimited cloud storage offerings for legacy users.

With its new business model, does Wuala has a chance to make any profit? Here is a comparison of some offerings of online backup plans, not in favor of Wuala ...

Vendor

Apple iCloud

Box

Dropbox

Google Drive

MediaFire

Microsoft OneDrive

Wuala

Free

5GB

10GB

2GB