Goodbye Rapidshare: shuts down free offer, increases pricing


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Goodbye Rapidshare: shuts down free offer, increases pricing

 

Rapidshare was once one of the most popular file hosting websites in the world. It started to go downhill a couple of years ago when the company changed its business model significantly to a file owner paid hosting model.

 

While that was beneficial to users who only downloaded from the file hosting site, it limited paying customers to a certain transfer ratio per day.

 

Since download limits were removed, incentives to sign up for a paid account to improve download performance on Rapidshare or download more than a certain amount of data became non-issues.

 

Affiliates promoted Rapidshare prior to the change to downloaders who wanted to avoid slow downloads and bandwidth limitations. With the incentive gone, many turned to other file hosting services instead.

 

Less than a year later, Rapidshare announced that it would drop the unlimited storage plan that it had offered previously. Users who were over the limit suddenly faced the decision to pay a lot of money for their data storage, or turn to different hosting providers instead.

 

Then two months later news of layoffs made the round and things went downhill ever since. The last subscription plan change was announced September 2013 and things went quiet afterwards.

 

A notification is displayed to Rapidshare users who visit the website as of today. Rapidshare notifies its customers that it made the decision to terminate standard plans completely on the site.

 

rapidshare-notice.jpg

 

In addition to shutting down the standard plan as of July 1, 2014, it announced the pricing of the two plans it will offer in the future:

  • Standard Plus for ?49.99 per month
  • Premium for ?99.99 per month

Last year, accounts were available for ?8.21 and ?16.43 per month respectively which means that account prices have been increased by the factor six.

 

It is not clear if they will provide the same benefits as the old accounts, or if storage capacities or bandwidth per day has been increased as part of the price increase.

 

The offering page highlights the same storage capacities and the new prices which is a strong indicator that Rapidshare increased the price for each paid account type but kept everything else as is.

 

The company recommends that free users upgrade their account to a paid account, or backup the data that they have stored on Rapidshare prior to July 1, 2014. Rapidshare did not mention what it plans to do with data uploaded by free account users after July 1. It is however very likely that it will be deleted.

 

Closing Word

 

The removal of the free account option may make sense from a business perspective. But a price increase by the factor six is surely going to cause a mass exodus by existing users of the service.

 

While I have no information about Rapidshare's financials, it appears likely that the majority of paying users will shut down their account and migrate to another file hosting company instead.

 

Considering that you get 10 Terabyte of storage on Google Drive for the price of Rapidshare's Premium account, it is almost certain that a lot of users will move their data to other companies.

 

Source: ghacks.net

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rip rapidshare, i think i am getting old, i remember using it a lot in 2005 and 2006 -  thats 8/9 years ago!!! :|

 

now there are a lot of other one click file hosters, but no clear market-leader which means if you like download a lot you are lost because no one would buy lets say 1 premium account at uploaded, one at share-online and how they are all called....

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To put this into perspective: Rapidshare is charging as much for a month as Neowinian Kudos is charging for a year of hostr.co pro. 

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The days of free online storage is coming to a close lads!

 

There's are more quality free online storage than ever.

 

it's the ones that cater to "sharing anonymously" that's going the way of the dodo. 

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With services like Mega around, do they really think people will pay 50 bucks a month to share files? Hell I can share files with a free One Drive account.

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ya i used to use rapidshare a few years ago but they increased their prices and even then is was way too much compared to others, haven't looked back and don't see many links for it any more either.   that new price is ridiculous too

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Rapidshare shut my account down without refunding my money, which I had just paid a month of, when it went to that stupid setup of not allowing you to share your files with others. Has to be one of the dumbest business decisions ever made. That was the sole purpose of it, IMO.

 

Hope they have to file bankruptcy and owe tons of money to some one!!

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Rapidshare shut my account down without refunding my money, which I had just paid a month of, when it went to that stupid setup of not allowing you to share your files with others. Has to be one of the dumbest business decisions ever made. That was the sole purpose of it, IMO.

 

Hope they have to file bankruptcy and owe tons of money to some one!!

 

It is funny how they were on the top of the "sharing is caring" crowd and they were the place-to-be, yet now they are just simply a sad story. What the hell was their management thinking during the last 10 years? If there is an example about how NOT to run a business, it is this.

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It is funny how they were on the top of the "sharing is caring" crowd and they were the place-to-be, yet now they are just simply a sad story. What the hell was their management thinking during the last 10 years? If there is an example about how NOT to run a business, it is this.

 

I would imagine their management was thinking, "we've made millions from people sharing pirated material, lets slowly wind down all our operations before we get sued (again) and lose the millions we've amassed".  Sounds like a sensible decision to me.

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i never used them for anything because their free offerings were always so slow they were ultimately useless.

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It is funny how they were on the top of the "sharing is caring" crowd and they were the place-to-be, yet now they are just simply a sad story. What the hell was their management thinking during the last 10 years? If there is an example about how NOT to run a business, it is this.

 

I've seen this to be true with many tech (hardware or software based) companies this past decade. As one rose to dominance and became comfortable and stopped pushing as hard as they did, other companies would spring up and the dominant player was slow to react, eventually subsiding in the users mind. This is a field where you have to keep up or you become irrelevant pretty quickly.

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Serves them right for getting overly greedy and trying to hide too much of their functionality behind paywalls, this move will probably deal them their death blow. If you're at the top the fall to the bottom is even harder, and it looks like their arrogance has cost them.

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Never really liked RapidShare.

 

Oh you wanted to download this file?  Well you have to wait an hour now.  Oh your file was uploaded in parts?  Well you can have the first 2 but then wait for the rest.

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I would imagine their management was thinking, "we've made millions from people sharing pirated material, lets slowly wind down all our operations before we get sued (again) and lose the millions we've amassed".  Sounds like a sensible decision to me.

 

Maybe. But pirated stuff can just as easily be shared through OneDrive.

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Not to mention that piracy was against their TOS and they actively removed any pirated content that was made known to them. A lot of Neowin's moral evangelists seem to seriously believe that such sites should be able to monitor every single one of the millions of files that get uploaded to such places every day.

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There's are more quality free online storage than ever.

 

it's the ones that cater to "sharing anonymously" that's going the way of the dodo. 

Not necessarily. A friend told me about this one recently and the best part is that both upload and download are very fast.

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Firedrive, Mega, OneDrive, and even your own server are viable options. Who cares about Rapidshare anymore? Rapidshare and all the other greedy storage companies will die soon.

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