November 13, 2022
Apple began paying Apple iCloud Plus subscribers in the United States between 2015 and 2016 after a class-action lawsuit alleged that the company stored the data of iCloud subscribers on third-party servers without informing them and demanded Apple Pay $14.8 million to users.
Payment notifications have been buzzing, but payment for some users is said to be less than a dollar. For example, members of the Apple Insider editorial team who paid iCloud subscriptions for the entire period covered by the settlement were notified that their payout would be only $0.49, which equates to less than two weeks of service for the $0.99 iCloud+ tier, less than five days for the $2.99/month 200 GB tier and less than two days for the $9.99 2 TB version.
The basic version of Apple’s iCloud includes 5 GB of storage, but additional storage requires a paid iCloud Plus subscription. Plaintiffs in Williams v. Apple filed a lawsuit in 2019 alleging that Apple used third-party servers to store data but did not mention them in its marketing materials or terms and conditions.
However, the amount paid to users depends on the length of the subscription, capacity options, the number of paid accounts and other factors.
The sources for this piece include an article in AppleInsider.
