Digital photo frame company Nixplay cut its free cloud storage to almost nothing

One of the most frustrating realities about modern technology products is that while so many of them can get exciting new features via the internet, they can lose them just as easily. That happened to owners of Nixplay smart digital photo frames this week when they were hit with a previously announced update the company said would “remove premium features and reduce limits,” including dropping cloud photo and video storage to just 500MB.

Nixplay has offered free cloud storage for a long time — here’s a 2016 PCMag review that mentions an 8-inch frame that came with 10GB of space for no extra charge. In addition to losing higher storage limits, the company has also nixed the previously free ability to sync a single Google Photos album. The company’s announcement said that those whose existing free accounts already exceed the new 500MB limit would see some content “restricted from sharing or viewing on a frame without editing your content or upgrading your subscription.”

People on the Nixplay subreddit aren’t happy about the change, with posts complaining about the changes affecting existing customers rather than only new ones or calling it a scam. One user’s begrudging post says they’ll subscribe, but that they’re only doing so because they’ve accrued “a few thousand photos in the cloud” and don’t want to teach their partner, who hates computers, how to use a new app.

Nixplay’s paid subscriptions cost either $19.99 a year for 100GB of photo storage (Nixplay Lite) or $29.99 per year for unlimited photo storage (Nixplay Plus). Both tiers also include the ability to sync with Google Photos, although it’s not clear if that feature works the same as it did before, given a recent change Google made that broke how many digital frames sync with its photos service.