Kim Dotcom’s Mega Opens For Early-Access Users, Reveals Pricing Tiers, Roadmap With Mobile Access, IM, Office-Style Features

Leading up to the launch of Kim Dotcom’s latest effort, Mega, today the company opened the site up to its first early-access users. It’s also published pricing for premium users, as well as a roadmap of features that it plans to add to the site after launch, having run out of time to implement them all before Sunday. The list reveals a wide ambition that includes mobile access; word-processing, spreadsheets and other Office-style functions; instant messaging and more.

The service itself, in my early look today, largely resembles a simplified version of Dropbox and other cloud-based storage services. I’m accessing it on Chrome — which Mega recommends. “If you are planning on using MEGA frequently, there is currently no alternative to using the most advanced browser currently in existence – Google Chrome,” it notes in a blog post today.

Basic Mega has a folder to either drag or select files, as well as an inbox, and a contacts tab. So far, I’ve tried to create a contact to see what I can do with it, but that feature does not appear to have been turned on yet. I think there should be more functionality coming up. Earlier today, the CEO of domain registry company Instra, who is an investor in Mega, told me that Instra would be providing domain name, hosting and email services on top of the support services that were officially announced today. I think we’ll need to give the site itself a closer look when all the features have been turned on.

Here’s how it looks so far, with one of my test files uploaded.

In the meantime, some other details.

First, the pricing. As we already know, Mega will be offering a basic package of 50GB of storage free of charge. Today’s early look also shows that it will it will also be selling paid tiers. These are on three levels, at €9.99, €19.99 and €29.99 per month, respectively with 500GB storage/1 terabyte bandwidth, 2TB/4TB and 4TB/8TB.

Second, what we might see here next. In addition to possible domain, hosting and email services, Mega also got a mea culpa out early doors and posted today in a separate blog post about all the features that it plans to add to the service in the coming months. “Time flies when building a website, and unfortunately, half of the launch feature list that we envisioned when we started implementing MEGA back in September has now turned into a post-launch development roadmap,” it writes.

Because I think most people will have “access denied” if they try to look at the list right now — because of the early access protection — I’m pasting the info at the bottom of this post.  Suffice it to say, the list reveals a service very high on ambition, covering enhancements for developers as well as for its regular users, including more functionality in how the cloud storage service works with file transfer options; lots of features for collaboration with other users including instant messaging and encrypted file sharing; complete API documentation in the SDK; desktop and mobile clients for “all major platforms”; and a Google Docs competitor with word processing, calendar and spreadsheet functionality.