Bitcasa killing Drive cloud storage service on May 20, will focus on ‘growing platform business’

Bitcasa, a company that has offered a cloud storage service for backing up files, today announced the discontinuation of its Bitcasa Drive cloud service. The service will become unavailable at 11:59 p.m. PT on May 20.

“We are discontinuing our Bitcasa Drive service in order to focus our full attention on our growing platform business,” the company said in an unusually succinct blog post. “All account owners must take action to avoid losing their files. For more information, please visit our Help Center. Thank you for being a Bitcasa Drive user. We have appreciated all of your support.”

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Aside from Bitcasa Drive, the company offers CloudFS application programming interfaces (APIs) that companies can use to embed Bitcasa’s capabilities into their own applications.

With its consumer service, though, Bitcasa has had several competitors, including Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, not to mention Backblaze, Carbonite, Code42’s CrashPlan, and IDrive.

This is sudden, for sure, but in 2014 Bitcasa stopped giving users an unlimited amount of storage, and earlier this month Bitcasa announced that free 5GB accounts were going away. The company stated that these accounts would be converted into “free trial” accounts that would be available for 60 days beginning on April 7.

Bitcasa also has offered a “premium” 1TB service tier for $10 per month and a “pro” 10TB tier for $99 per month.

The company started in 2011 and is based in Mountain View, California. Investors include Pelion Venture Partners, Horizons Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, CrunchFund, and Samsung Ventures.