Hot on the heels of Baidu’s new cloud storage offering, the Russian-language search engine Yandex has just announced the removal of the invitation-only policy for its Yandex.Disk cloud storage service. From now on, anyone wishing to sign up and get themselves up to 20GB of free storage can do so without having to beg one of their vodka-slurping friends for an invite.

Yandex.Disk works much like Dropbox or Box, providing a convenient folder in the cloud for internet users who wish to upload, store and share files of different formats and sizes. Unlike physical storage systems, such as a hard drive or flash drive, cloud storage means that users can upload photos, media files or important work documents, and then access them from any connected device, no matter where in the world they are.

New users who sign up for the Yandex.Disk service will be given an initial 10GB of free storage space, which can be extended to 20GB if they can successfully persuade one of their friends to sign up for the service as well.

Vladimir Rusinov, head of Yandex.Disk, explained that the company had received amazing feedback during its beta phase, invitation-only period:

“We want to thank everyone who helped us to improve the service. Today, Yandex.Disk welcomes all to join in and try our mobile application, which beautifully complements the cloud service. Our doors are now open to everyone,”

The official Yandex.Disk app is supported by both Android and Apple devices, providing users with a convenient way to access their Yandex.Disk files on the go.

One of the key advantages of the service is that sharing files with other mobile devices uses significantly less data than other, similar services – when you want to share something, the app lets you forward a link to the file that’s uploaded on its servers. In addition, Yandex.Disk also helps to preserve internal memory. For example, when you take a new photo or create a new file, this can be saved directly to Yandex.Disk instead of your device.