The Cloud Was Always Just Someone Else's Computer, and Now They Want More Rent

Someone on r/selfhosted posted about Microsoft quietly changing the OneDrive storage deal on 365 Family subscriptions, going from 1TB per family member to 2TB shared across the whole household. Sounds like more storage until you do the maths and realise five people sharing 2TB is a downgrade dressed up as a gift. The top comment called it “the shittiest of enshittification,” and I had to laugh, because that word has earned its keep this year.

I’ve had a 365 Family sub for about six years. Mostly for Word and Excel, because my wife’s work still lives and dies by .docx formatting that LibreOffice occasionally mangles. The OneDrive storage was always the bit I tolerated rather than wanted. Now it’s shrinking, the price went up, and in return I get an AI assistant bolted onto Word that I have never once asked for and will never use. That’s the bit that gets me. It’s not just “pay more for less,” it’s “pay more for less, plus a feature you didn’t want, that’s probably why the price went up in the first place.”

The responses on that thread went where you’d expect: cancel the subscription, buy a NAS, do it yourself. I’ve got a lot of sympathy for that instinct. I run a Synology at home, mostly for family photos and a Plex library that’s slowly turning into a small obsession. There’s something genuinely satisfying about having your kid’s entire childhood in photos sitting on a drive in your own house instead of scattered across a server farm in some data centre you’ll never see, run by a company that can change the rules whenever a shareholder call doesn’t go well.

But self-hosting isn’t a free lunch, and the thread was honest about that too. Someone worried about drive prices, which have gone a bit mental this year thanks to the AI data centre boom hoovering up manufacturing capacity. Someone else pointed out that a NAS without offsite backup is a false sense of security, it just means when your house floods or burns down, you lose the only copy instead of the only copy you controlled. That’s the tension nobody fully resolves: cloud storage gives you someone else’s redundancy and someone else’s terms of service, self-hosting gives you control and a single point of failure sitting in your spare room. Both of those things are true at once, and I don’t think there’s a clean answer.

What struck me most was the comment about doing physical backup swaps with family, dropping a hard drive off at a sibling’s place over a coffee every few months. It’s low-tech, slightly ridiculous, and I love it. No subscription, no API, no company deciding your storage tier needs “optimising.” Just two people who trust each other and a USB cable. We did something similar with my in-laws for a while, an external drive that migrated between Glen Waverley and Pakenham every couple of months. It felt almost old-fashioned, like something out of before the cloud existed, and it worked fine.

I don’t think everyone cancelling OneDrive is really angry about the storage limit. I think it’s the accumulation. Price rises, AI features nobody asked for, shrinking value, and a company that assumes you’ll just absorb it because switching is a hassle. At some point the hassle of switching gets smaller than the hassle of being quietly ripped off. That’s roughly where a lot of people in that thread had landed.

I haven’t cancelled mine yet. I probably will when the renewal notice lands, mostly out of spite rather than any grand plan. In the meantime I’m going to keep backing up photos to the NAS, keep an eye on drive prices in case they ever remember what reasonable looks like, and feel a bit smug every time Clippy’s AI-powered grandchild pops up in Word uninvited and I get to ignore it from my own hardware instead of paying extra for the privilege.