

Dear Dropbox I want to give you money, but my way? - messel

I love dropbox. But I don't think 50gbytes is with $10/month so I stay a free member. Mostly so I don't actually lose anything if I decided to cancel later.<p>You see there's a psychological barrier to me opting in. How about a one time payment plan? Compete with portable drives with a one time fee and soft guarantee of reliable online storage. I don't want to have to keep paying $10/month, but a one time $X dollar fee would flip the switch in 
my head to opt in.<p>Just a heads up.
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SwellJoe
One-time fees are somewhat risky for new companies, though they also have some
appeal.

The risks are that Dropbox probably does not yet actually know with certainty
what it costs to store and backup your data for a long period of time. We all
know it gets cheaper per GB, over time, for raw storage but there are other
costs, as well, and with bandwidth getting cheaper, it may be that the use
cases for Dropbox expand to include things that are more demanding or
expensive for them to provide.

There's also the concern (an ethical one) that perhaps Dropbox may not be a
sustainable business model, and might be forced to shut down in a year,
leaving a bunch of customers (rightly) feeling screwed.

That said, the benefits for a vendor in providing a one-time fee are pretty
huge. After three years in business we just queitly introduced our first
lifetime license type a couple of months ago, and it's been a _nice_ bump to
our short-term revenue; about 20% for the first two months it has existed.
And, that money is probably more valuable to us today than it will be in four
years (which is when the "lifetime" option begins paying the customer back for
the higher initial price).

So, if the Dropbox guys were asking my advice, I'd say it's probably wise to
add a lifetime pricing option. But only once you have enough data to know you
can afford to offer it profitably, and you have reasonable expectations about
how much it will cost to continue offering the service in the future. Money is
worth more to startups today than it will be next year, so get the most money
you can up front.

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messel
Thanks Joe, that makes perfect sense and would be a great option for me as a
buyer. Every purchase I make there's a risk of failure over time. There's a
perception of paying forever that's hard for me to get past with the current
pricing scheme. I get web hosting cheaper (for multiple sites), and Dropbox
feels more limited at this point.

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dualogy
If you're so understanding of your own psychology, couldn't you just tell your
brain the "fixed" sum of say 10x12 or 10x20 and be done with your decision-
making?... ;)

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messel
I don't know what the X is. If I use dropbox for say 10 years, then the cost
is pretty large and I'd likely never opt in.

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yrashk
I'd better pay for some business features, not just mere space

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dotcoma
even better: the first ones to chip in pay less, and then other people will
have to fork out more, as they will be able to share documents with a larger
user base.

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chaosprophet
Perhaps you should write directly to dropbox???

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messel
If it was just me that liked the concept there's little reason for them to
consider implementing it.

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SwellJoe
They have millions of users...if it's something a lot of people want, they
will have heard about it from many people already.

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messel
That's a fair assumption. I hadn't seen it anywhere, could be a bad suggestion
on my part? I wonder how many paying users they have so far though, that's the
part I'd care about as a startup.

Different pricing models can open up the doors top bigger conversion rates
though. They are probably considering different levels.

