The dotted i's are the same height at lowercase d's (see "ideally"). And then the capital letters are shorter than lowercase l's (see "Plus"). Then you've got a fancy lowercase g that stretches up to match the height of its other lowercase brethren.
You can tell they spent quite a bit of resources on design... I just can't get used to it. It doesn't feel friendly or useful either, it doesn't fit what I'd expect from a cloud storage provider and it's not really pretty to look at either.
I always thought their much heralded rebrand/redesign was pretty awful. It reminds me of my 70s childhood with the fonts and browns. And for me it fails in a key way: it doesn't help communicate information - I find it's actually fairly distracting.
Dropbox, from one of your first paying customer, I do not need more space, I want family sharing and face recognition on pictures. Thus I’ll move to icloud..
Pretty sure the idea is not to be Netflix and offer a family plan, it's to sell a suite of features into small businesses and corporations. E.g. They just acquired HelloSign.
You should move to iCloud if you absolutely want those features unless they say they're building them or you anticipate some form of auto-tagging and face recognition being useful for professional/business users.
Exactly. I do NOT want to use business plan for my family!
They still do not address whether shared folder count against your space. It is just stupid. This means I can not share the photo folder with my family members. If I have 500G of photos, and I share the photo folder with my other family members, it will take 500G from each one of them? How ridiculous it is! This is why I have to convert from Dropbox to OneDrive. I still use Dropbox without subscription, because it auto renames camera photos.
The B2C business wouldn’t be nearly as lucrative to them as the B2B business in terms of ROI. They don’t bother with family plans because of the opportunity cost.
That seems very misleading. Ubuntu 18.04 doesn't even support ecryptfs (as far as I know, certainly it isn't the default), and it was not recommended for years prior because it's not a very solid protection (for many reasons).
If you use ext4 + luks encryption I believe Dropbox works fine.
Standard disclaimer, I work at Dropbox, but I have absolutely nothing to do with product. Opinions are my own etc etc
Thanks for the clarification. The key issue, then, is for people running other filesystems in Linux. And especially for *BSD users.
Re LUKS, I meant to use a tool that converts the encrypted LUKS volume (on this machine, /dev/md1) to an image file. Working in a USB drive, say. Then storing that 500GB (or whatever) file in Dropbox. If that's too big, then have a separate smaller LUKS volume. Or even, for VMs, a LUKS-encrypted VDI.
Also, the unencrypted LUKS volume can just be ext4, for Dropbox compatibility.
Do they have a timetable for when they'll upgrade existing plans? I'm on plus and while I don't care too much about the extra 1TB of space the smart sync would be really nice.
Many times I’ve almost bit the bullet and paid for the (now old) Dropbox professional plan just for the smart syncing capability. But I decided not to because the feature was not worth an extra $9.99. But for $2 extra, I’d say this is a nice upgrade for smart syncing and extra storage.
I really wish dropbox would offer a 2$ plan for 100GB comparable to google drive because I just don't need a full TB and I'd easily sign all family members up. The syncing is just way faster than the google drive sync.
In Dropbox’s most recent quarter[1], the cost of goods sold - that is, the cost of actually delivering the service, not marketing, corporate operations, or other tasks - was about 25.5% of revenue.
That means of every $10 Dropbox charges, they spent an average of ~$2.55 on service delivery costs like storage. Customer support is often included in that, but let’s assume all $2.55 was spent on storage. On a $10/month plan, reducing the included storage by 50% would reduce their costs by ~$1.27.
Using your example, decreasing the storage by 90% would reduce their costs by about $2. That is, to generate equivalent margin, the available plans would be 1 TB for $10 or 100 GB for $8 (not $2).
I'm only an engineer and don't have much business acumen so forgive me if that is a dumb question, but wouldn't it be perfectly fine to accept a much lower margin as long as you're still making money, given that having me around as a Dropbox customer is better than me going to a competitor?
In general, sure. In reality... not necessarily. Just think about everything else that goes into providing the service and getting (and retaining) users.
After you’ve included marketing and all the business people who are guiding the direction of the product you’ve got the HR and internal IT people and systems supporting all of that.
Having 100 customers paying $10 and 1000 paying $1 are very different things. Customer service costs are going to be (likely disproportionately) higher for the latter group simply because you’ve got a different pool - they are no longer your business users and power users, they’re grandma and grandpa who have no idea what they’re doing or how to explore and figure out how to use your service. Even if you build better tools and guides for self service that’s an engineering investment.
Credit card transaction fees will also be higher. Due to the type of user you’re also going to have a much higher rate of failures, which means more retries, follow-ups (Sendgrid is charging per email after all), and more users who are in the grace period whose data you have to retain but who aren’t actually paying for it. You’ll also have more people calling in or emailing trying to resolve this, which brings us back to higher customer service costs.
So while storage seems like what you’re selling and that there should be a linear correlation between 100gb and 1tb in reality what you’re selling is the service around that storage and that’s why things will never scale the way you’d expect.
In addition to chrismeller’s reply, I’d add one other consideration: some, probably a lot, of current 1 TB customers would be satisfied with 100 GB. If Dropbox offered, say, a $5/mo plan with 100 GB, it’s possible that many existing $10+ customers would downgrade, so although they’d make some money from new paying users, they’d also make less from existing paying users.
In a sense, it’s a linear programming problem: finding the number of customers of each plan (current or hypothetical) which maximizes the resulting profit.
(Worth noting that if Dropbox was losing a ton - say, 20%/year - of customers to a cheaper competitor and they had enough margin to make a more competitive plan, they’d probably do so. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though.)
Pasting here but tip for the future, use the "reading mode" on your browser.
Updated plans get more storage and improved capabilities
By Dropbox Team
3-4 minutes
We’re always looking for ways to make Dropbox better for you and the way you work. So, we’re unveiling improvements to our plans to help you store more content and work more efficiently.
Plus the storage and more
You’ve got many files and multiple devices, so it’s important to have easy access to the content you need, whenever you want it. And, ideally, everything is stored in one secure place with space to spare.
That’s why we’re doubling storage for Dropbox Plus to 2 TB—plenty of room for all your files, photos, videos, and projects. We’re also adding Dropbox Smart Sync, so you can move out-of-date items from your hard drive to the cloud and save space on your computer. And full-text search (coming soon) lets you search the text content of your files using keywords instead of a file name or extension, so you can find what you’re looking for even faster.
We also know accidents happen, so we’re introducing Dropbox Rewind, our account rollback capability that keeps your content—along with your peace of mind—intact. With Rewind, you can undo accidental edits or restore deleted work by taking folders or your entire account back to any time in the last 30 days.
Plus subscribers can get all this for the new price of $11.99 a month—or save $2 a month with our annual plan. Existing Plus subscribers will get these new features for the same price until the end of their current billing cycle. After that point, they will move to the new pricing structure.
Look and work like a Professional
With the updated Dropbox Professional, you can do less busywork and more of your best work, while also making life easier for your clients.
Professional users can show off their work with features like preview support for DWG and MXF files, time-based comments, and Dropbox Showcase. Now, we’re making it even better for you to share and secure your work with:
3 TB of storage—that’s 50% more space than previously available with Professional plans
Dropbox Rewind, our new account rollback feature, with 180-day version history, an increase from 120 days
A watermarking tool that lets you protect your work and ideas
An enhanced Smart Sync that automatically moves out-of-date items off your computer and into the cloud
Professional subscribers will get our new features with no change to their current pricing.
Not just Business as usual
Coming soon, we’ll also be rolling out improvements to our Dropbox Business plans. Standard users will get 5 TB of storage, an increase from 3 TB. Business Standard and Advanced teams will also get 180 days of file version history, up from 120-day version history.
Business Standard and Advanced teams will get these coming updates with no change to their current pricing.
We’re excited to roll out these changes to Plus and Professional starting today.
To learn more and find the right Dropbox for you, visit our Plus and Professional plans pages. Or get to know our newest features, Rewind, enhanced Smart Sync, and watermarking.
I've had a professional plan for quite some time so that I would have access to Smart Sync. I'm rather excited about being able to pay less and still get everything I want.
Despite using dropbox heavily for work (And liking it), I don't understand their value proposition for personal use. Their pricing seems completely out of line with their competition.
2TB or nothing for a single account with no family sharing that costs more than iCloud? No thanks.
I would consider upgrading my free plan if they had smaller storage tiers available at competitive prices. Even then it would be a hard sell since it isn't as well integrated as iCloud is on Apple's ecosystem.
I agree. Paying 9.99 for 2TB of iCloud storage is an easy pill to swallow when it’s backing up my phone (and photos) automatically. I’ll never understand why Dropbox avoids the smaller tiers for personal accounts. They have to be missing out on a sizable market.
> I’ll never understand why Dropbox avoids the smaller tiers for personal accounts. They have to be missing out on a sizable market.
Magic Pocket [1] makes the storage one of the cheaper parts of their capex/opex, so it's more prudent (hopefully backed by data on their side) to throw storage at users while pushing the average revenue per consumer user up. Could they lower the price while delivering less storage? Sure! Would they achieve the same margins? I'd hazard a guess they've run the numbers and the answer is no.
Agreed. I have 32 GB for free after maxing out referrals and all of their DropQuests but would jump on a $2-$5/month plan with less storage. 2 TB is overkill for what I need.
> 2TB or nothing for a single account with no family sharing that costs more than iCloud? No thanks.
This seems to be the trend across some other providers too. Keep prices the same (or even increase it, like SpiderOak) and provide more space that most people wouldn't need or use. Effectively, they rely on people not using the storage quota fully.
As a end user, I can't understand or support not having lower price points with lower storage quota, family sharing, etc.
On the Microsoft side you get 5 licenses of office, 5x1TB OneDrive accounts for around 80 to 100 usd per year (you can shop around and find better prices that's why I put a range)
For me it is Office 365 making it hard to buy Dropbox. Office 365 Personal now gives the following for $70/year or $7/month:
• 1 TB OneDrive for one user.
• Install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and Access on as many PCs, Macs, tablets, and phones as you want for one user (Publisher and Access are PC only).
• Also adds some features to OneNote, and gives 60 minutes per month on Skype.
For $100 year, or $10/month, you can get Office 365 Home. The differences from Personal are:
• You can add up to 5 family members, for a total of 6 users including yourself.
• Each user gets 1 TB of OneDrive.
Personal used to only allow the Office apps on 1 Mac, 1 PC, and 1 mobile device, but they removed those limits late in 2018.
Google Drive offers unlimited file storage for their G Suite plans which are now roughly $11/mo I believe. They also do free versioning and have cross-platform clients. While Linux isn't directly supported, there are several great clients. The Team Drive feature is pretty neat too.
Full-text search available for free with Google Drive. It's surprising that it's available on the more expensive Dropbox plans yet still "coming soon" on the Plus plan.
>We’re always looking for ways to make Dropbox better for you
Like by reducing the number of linkable devices from infinity to 3 for free accounts? I was enjoying my free 16GB of space from referring two dozen of my friends and family members. Guess how many angry text messages and e-mails I've received.
Hint: way more than enough to preclude me from recommending Dropbox to anyone ever again.
Same here. Replaced Dropbox with Resilio Sync. It's really beyond the pale to retroactively cripple existing accounts. And their website still claims "Sync files across devices" as a feature for free accounts, which I'd consider a lie ("Sync files across devices", which is the entire point of having Dropbox at all, is very different from "Sync files across three devices")
46 comments
[ 5.7 ms ] story [ 94.4 ms ] threadThe dotted i's are the same height at lowercase d's (see "ideally"). And then the capital letters are shorter than lowercase l's (see "Plus"). Then you've got a fancy lowercase g that stretches up to match the height of its other lowercase brethren.
You should move to iCloud if you absolutely want those features unless they say they're building them or you anticipate some form of auto-tagging and face recognition being useful for professional/business users.
They still do not address whether shared folder count against your space. It is just stupid. This means I can not share the photo folder with my family members. If I have 500G of photos, and I share the photo folder with my other family members, it will take 500G from each one of them? How ridiculous it is! This is why I have to convert from Dropbox to OneDrive. I still use Dropbox without subscription, because it auto renames camera photos.
If you use ext4 + luks encryption I believe Dropbox works fine.
Standard disclaimer, I work at Dropbox, but I have absolutely nothing to do with product. Opinions are my own etc etc
What about ext3, xfs, etc?
Encrypted files (7zip, GnuPG, VeraCrypt, etc) behave just like normal files, right?
I don't think the files get backed up encrypted, they get backed up decrypted, and are encrypted at the filesystem layer only.
It isn't as if you can't put encrypted data into Dropbox, this is just about filesystems.
> What about ext3, xfs, etc?
To my knowledge these are not supported filesystems, but there's probably an official doc stating this somewhere.
> Encrypted files (7zip, GnuPG, VeraCrypt, etc) behave just like normal files, right?
Sure, throw them into a Dropbox folder and they should upload just fine.
Re LUKS, I meant to use a tool that converts the encrypted LUKS volume (on this machine, /dev/md1) to an image file. Working in a USB drive, say. Then storing that 500GB (or whatever) file in Dropbox. If that's too big, then have a separate smaller LUKS volume. Or even, for VMs, a LUKS-encrypted VDI.
Also, the unencrypted LUKS volume can just be ext4, for Dropbox compatibility.
Correct.
> Then storing that 500GB (or whatever) file in Dropbox.
Sure, Dropbox can handle that.
> We’re excited to roll out these changes to Plus and Professional starting today.
That means of every $10 Dropbox charges, they spent an average of ~$2.55 on service delivery costs like storage. Customer support is often included in that, but let’s assume all $2.55 was spent on storage. On a $10/month plan, reducing the included storage by 50% would reduce their costs by ~$1.27.
Using your example, decreasing the storage by 90% would reduce their costs by about $2. That is, to generate equivalent margin, the available plans would be 1 TB for $10 or 100 GB for $8 (not $2).
[1]: https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-detai...
After you’ve included marketing and all the business people who are guiding the direction of the product you’ve got the HR and internal IT people and systems supporting all of that.
Having 100 customers paying $10 and 1000 paying $1 are very different things. Customer service costs are going to be (likely disproportionately) higher for the latter group simply because you’ve got a different pool - they are no longer your business users and power users, they’re grandma and grandpa who have no idea what they’re doing or how to explore and figure out how to use your service. Even if you build better tools and guides for self service that’s an engineering investment.
Credit card transaction fees will also be higher. Due to the type of user you’re also going to have a much higher rate of failures, which means more retries, follow-ups (Sendgrid is charging per email after all), and more users who are in the grace period whose data you have to retain but who aren’t actually paying for it. You’ll also have more people calling in or emailing trying to resolve this, which brings us back to higher customer service costs.
So while storage seems like what you’re selling and that there should be a linear correlation between 100gb and 1tb in reality what you’re selling is the service around that storage and that’s why things will never scale the way you’d expect.
Here’s more on this tradeoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalization_(marketing). And on substitute goods, as a 100 GB plan would be for some 1 TB customers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitute_good
In a sense, it’s a linear programming problem: finding the number of customers of each plan (current or hypothetical) which maximizes the resulting profit.
(Worth noting that if Dropbox was losing a ton - say, 20%/year - of customers to a cheaper competitor and they had enough margin to make a more competitive plan, they’d probably do so. That doesn’t seem to be the case here, though.)
Updated plans get more storage and improved capabilities By Dropbox Team 3-4 minutes
We’re always looking for ways to make Dropbox better for you and the way you work. So, we’re unveiling improvements to our plans to help you store more content and work more efficiently. Plus the storage and more
You’ve got many files and multiple devices, so it’s important to have easy access to the content you need, whenever you want it. And, ideally, everything is stored in one secure place with space to spare.
That’s why we’re doubling storage for Dropbox Plus to 2 TB—plenty of room for all your files, photos, videos, and projects. We’re also adding Dropbox Smart Sync, so you can move out-of-date items from your hard drive to the cloud and save space on your computer. And full-text search (coming soon) lets you search the text content of your files using keywords instead of a file name or extension, so you can find what you’re looking for even faster.
We also know accidents happen, so we’re introducing Dropbox Rewind, our account rollback capability that keeps your content—along with your peace of mind—intact. With Rewind, you can undo accidental edits or restore deleted work by taking folders or your entire account back to any time in the last 30 days.
Plus subscribers can get all this for the new price of $11.99 a month—or save $2 a month with our annual plan. Existing Plus subscribers will get these new features for the same price until the end of their current billing cycle. After that point, they will move to the new pricing structure. Look and work like a Professional
With the updated Dropbox Professional, you can do less busywork and more of your best work, while also making life easier for your clients.
Professional users can show off their work with features like preview support for DWG and MXF files, time-based comments, and Dropbox Showcase. Now, we’re making it even better for you to share and secure your work with:
Professional subscribers will get our new features with no change to their current pricing. Not just Business as usualComing soon, we’ll also be rolling out improvements to our Dropbox Business plans. Standard users will get 5 TB of storage, an increase from 3 TB. Business Standard and Advanced teams will also get 180 days of file version history, up from 120-day version history.
Business Standard and Advanced teams will get these coming updates with no change to their current pricing. We’re excited to roll out these changes to Plus and Professional starting today.
To learn more and find the right Dropbox for you, visit our Plus and Professional plans pages. Or get to know our newest features, Rewind, enhanced Smart Sync, and watermarking.
Dropbox Plus, here I come!
2TB or nothing for a single account with no family sharing that costs more than iCloud? No thanks.
I would consider upgrading my free plan if they had smaller storage tiers available at competitive prices. Even then it would be a hard sell since it isn't as well integrated as iCloud is on Apple's ecosystem.
Magic Pocket [1] makes the storage one of the cheaper parts of their capex/opex, so it's more prudent (hopefully backed by data on their side) to throw storage at users while pushing the average revenue per consumer user up. Could they lower the price while delivering less storage? Sure! Would they achieve the same margins? I'd hazard a guess they've run the numbers and the answer is no.
[1] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/tag/magic-pocket/
This seems to be the trend across some other providers too. Keep prices the same (or even increase it, like SpiderOak) and provide more space that most people wouldn't need or use. Effectively, they rely on people not using the storage quota fully.
As a end user, I can't understand or support not having lower price points with lower storage quota, family sharing, etc.
• 1 TB OneDrive for one user.
• Install Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, and Access on as many PCs, Macs, tablets, and phones as you want for one user (Publisher and Access are PC only).
• Also adds some features to OneNote, and gives 60 minutes per month on Skype.
For $100 year, or $10/month, you can get Office 365 Home. The differences from Personal are:
• You can add up to 5 family members, for a total of 6 users including yourself.
• Each user gets 1 TB of OneDrive.
Personal used to only allow the Office apps on 1 Mac, 1 PC, and 1 mobile device, but they removed those limits late in 2018.
Like by reducing the number of linkable devices from infinity to 3 for free accounts? I was enjoying my free 16GB of space from referring two dozen of my friends and family members. Guess how many angry text messages and e-mails I've received.
Hint: way more than enough to preclude me from recommending Dropbox to anyone ever again.