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Ask HN: Why does Dropbox give 50 GB for $10/mo and Github only 1.2GB for $12/mo?

7 points by AndyKelley ↗ HN
I'm trying to come up with how much I should charge for my freemium startup, and I'm looking at these two as examples. From what I've researched, it's really hard to get a web server with lots of hard drive space without shelling out way too much money. Why is there such a huge discrepancy in these two companies? Any tips on where to host my server if I need lots of cheap disk space for my users?

11 comments

[ 11.8 ms ] story [ 980 ms ] thread
drKarl
Well, dropbox is just a personal online storage. That means that for $10 you can store up to 50Gb and you will be able to access it from anywhere. Github, on the other hand, is a distributed version control system, which means that many people can access and modify your data collaboratively.
AndyKelley
So your theory is not that they have a better deal in the backend, but that they are using less CPU cycles? Or perhaps that the development and maintenance costs are lower?
michael_dorfman
You seem to be under the illusion that pricing has a direct relationship to cost. That's backwards.

Pricing is based on the perceived value to the customer, not the cost to the producer.

Dropbox and GitHub are offering very different services, and are therefore pricing their services differently, based on what they believe the market will bear.

If you're trying to price a new service, I recommend you think about the value you are offering your customers, and how they perceive it. That will tell you what you are able to charge.

brazzy
However, if the price is much higher than the cost, it means that you're very vulnerable to competition undercutting you, unless there are entry barriers.
alex1
I think their pricing is based on the service's value to you rather than what their costs are.
AndyKelley
Wow, it seems so obvious now that you guys pointed it out. Thanks for that reminder, I had forgotten that important fact.
mike-cardwell
Dropbox sends data directly to/from Amazon S3 for its storage. Dropbox themselves don't provide any storage. Here is S3's pricing:

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

S3 charges for both storage and data transfer. Their most expensive data storage cost is 0.15USD/GB ie 7.50USD/month for 50GB. The more storage you use, the less per GB it costs, so I'm guessing Dropbox pay a lot less than 0.15USD/GB.

metachris
Afaik Dropbox also uses hashing to recognize already existing files (eg. Windows XP SP2, etc.). In their scale that will save quite a bit of storage too.
kneath
I'm curious where you see any limits for legitimate usage on GitHub. Or perhaps I've made this blurb on our pricing page ambiguous? http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Plans___Pricing_-_GitHub... I'd love to hear how I could improve it.

Edit: To answer your question, we impose soft limits for two reasons.

1) To prevent piracy & overall abuse 2) To protect people from themselves (if you have repos over our limits, you probably need guidance on what files you're committing to your repo)

tekkub
To add to this, we don't strictly enforce the limits (hence the liberal use of the word "soft"). We aren't going to lock you down if you go over the limit, so why does it matter? The limit is there to help you more than anything, if you're hitting it something is wrong somewhere.
AndyKelley
When I posted this, the pricing & signup page did list the soft limits on the page. Looks like you've changed the page to try to de-emphasize that. I'm not going to give negative or positive feedback because I'm not in a position of knowledge to do that.