
The Great Dropbox Space Race - joshma
https://www.dropbox.com/spacerace
======
venus
I don't really understand Dropbox's pricing strategy. Free is 2GB, which is
no-where near enough. But if you want to pay for more, you have to go all the
way to 100GB, which is way too much, for me at least. And the only in-between
option is to engage in these kind of games or spamming your friends to try to
make them sign up. I'm not going to do that.

Dropbox, if you would just offer $20/20GB and $50/50GB accounts I know at
least 5 people who would upgrade immediately. I feel like people want to pay,
but such a massive and unnecessary jump in capacity from the free to the
lowest paid plan is a real problem. And yeah, I do feel a bit personally
annoyed about this - I (somewhat reluctantly) pay for a 100GB account; I use
perhaps 10% of it.

I really don't care about this viral marketing to school students. Dropbox,
concentrate on your actual paying customers please.

EDIT: I checked and I use 7.0% of my 104.2GB paid account allowance.

~~~
aristidb
There is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is
not good business. People like patio11 make it constantly. The reason is that
people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support, and
don't actually contribute much to the bottom line.

Ignore for a moment that 100 GB is more than you need. Is $10/month too much
for you? Well...

But you don't need to spam friends, there are regularly things like contests
(Dropquest 2011, 2012) where you get free space for completing tasks.

And then there's of course the competition.

~~~
diego
The problem for Dropbox is that they use S3. It's really easy to bypass
Dropbox entirely and save money, even if you're non-technical. I use Arq on
OSX, and pay only for the amount of data I have on S3 (about $10 per month
right now). Dropbox's pricing is a race to the bottom.

~~~
flurian
It is cheaper to store 100GB in Dropbox than to store your own 100GB in S3. It
would cost $12.50 plus transfer costs to use S3. It costs $9.99 and no
transfer costs (besides your own net access) to use Dropbox. Dropbox is
storing a lot more than 100GB, so they get bulk prices.

~~~
mayneack
They also take advantage of a ton of redundant data.

~~~
diego
Not for me, I only back up my original content on Arq (video and pictures,
mostly).

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underwater
Dropbox reminds me a lot of webmail before Gmail. There were lots of small
increments in available space but it was always an issue for users. When Gmail
launched wih the promise that users would never again have to manage remaining
space they obliterated the competition.

Dropbox is training users to attach a high value to small amounts of space.
When a competent competitor launches with an order of magnitude more space it
will immediately seem like a much better deal because of Dropbox's years of
conditioning their users to think the only value proposition is the physical
space.

~~~
edanm
"When Gmail launched wih the promise that users would never again have to
manage remaining space they obliterated the competition."

Except that they didn't. For the last few years, Gmail was a distant third
competitor in the webmail space. It seems that now they're finally catching
up, and maybe overtaking Hotmail/Yahoo. But saying that at its launch it
"obliterated" the competition is simply incorrect.

~~~
jonknee
They didn't take over immediately (it's a pain to change email addresses, the
lock-in is pretty high), but they did force nearly immediate changes from the
major players. Hotmail at the time was offering only a few megabytes of
storage (!) while Yahoo! was offering 6MB. Within months both providers
greatly increased their storage, though not immediately to the level of Gmail,
to help retain users.

~~~
edanm
Agreed. I think this is a pretty good example of competition and market forces
causing all users to have an improvement, even though the vast majority don't
know or care about these things.

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Simucal
I see that the rewards for this program are for a limited time (extra 3GB for
2 years). Maybe they realized their free plan + referral space was too
generous. I currently have 21.9GB for free on my Dropbox taking advantage of
the 18GB of referrals you can get as well as the additional couple GB they
give you if you use the "Camera Upload" feature.

If they gave all these students that 3GB permanently that might bring people
up to some sweet spot where most of them wouldn't have a real need to pay for
the service.

~~~
Cass
I wonder what they're going to do when the promotion time runs out. If they're
going to delete or block access to a random 3 GB of data in someone's dropbox,
they're going to be dealing with a lot of upset customers.

(Should these people be aware of the fact that their space is going to run
out, and have up-to-date backups of their stuff? Obviously. But the hard fact
of life is that people do use dropbox as their only backup, and if something
goes wrong there, they're going to be a customer support headache.)

~~~
ihodes
The way it currently works is that they just don't allow you to upload
anything until you're below your limit. They continue to store whatever is
there, and do not delete it.

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k_kelly
I'm really interested that MIT is now top of the board considering it's a
relatively small university. It makes me wonder if this is going to become a
situation like when Slashdot attempted to poll for best graduate cs department
and it was botted to hell and back.

~~~
carb
I've been sent the referral link about fifteen different times in the past
hour from distinct people. It's been sent out on most mailing lists, shared
like crazy on facebook and in facebook groups, etc.

~~~
mdonahoe
I have a theory:

Are you less annoyed by the spam because it will benefit everyone at MIT? I
think students will be more willing to spam because it isnt seen as being
selfish.

------
mintplant
I don't really understand what's going on here. Could someone please explain
this to me?

~~~
nostromo
Better description here: [https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-
the-great-...](https://blog.dropbox.com/index.php/now-announcing-the-great-
dropbox-space-race/)

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ewolf
I love how number 1, 2, and 4 are Singaporean :D Nerd country!

~~~
spartango
Well that, and the time difference. Students in Singapore woke up 15 hours
before their counterparts on the West Coast of the US.

It's neat to see the effects of a global operation.

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randomchars
If only I had a university email account. I would just launch an adwords
campaign. :)

~~~
Goopplesoft
They block dropbox links nowadays.

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onedev
Dropbox are genius at marketing their product. Absolutely genius.

~~~
joshj19
Umm not to sound too negative, but genius is a pretty strong word. What about
this is genius? Referral programs are hardly anything new.

~~~
coolnow
I think the genius he's referring to is the fact that they're trying to get
educational institutions and students hooked on Dropbox, who could then go on
to deploying Dropbox for the whole university (unlikely, but it could happen
one day) and the students can go on to relying on Dropbox for their future
projects, potentially upgrading to Pro at some point.

~~~
onedev
Exactly this. Just looking at my posts in my Facebook newsfeed and Facebook
groups, this thing went insanely viral in a matter of minutes and people
really are signing up for Dropbox and really noticing it (those who haven't
been using it before).

The fact that they have a competition among universities and have the "top
students" at each university is a massive plus in getting people excited about
Dropbox.

~~~
rsync
They need to pump the growth numbers a bit more before the IPO.

Not the profit numbers, mind you, but the user numbers.

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eric-hu
As of the time of this writing, there are 4 Portugese universities among the
top 10. I would've expected tech-heavy universities to place among the top 10.
Is this the case with these schools?

2 Universidade Técnica de Lisboa 3694 8298 points

6 Universidade de Aveiro 2244 4812 points

8 Universidade do Porto 2060 4538 points

9 Universidade Nova de Lisboa 1943 4079 points

~~~
alexdias
Yes.

#2 is especially known for its technical institute (IST, where I study), which
competes with another one in #8 for the title of the country's best
engineering school (the one in Porto has been winning past years' programming
competitions).

#6 is known in the country for its CS degree.

~~~
tiagomatos
They are all portuguese tech universities. I have studied at #8.

------
meritt
Any word on if Dropbox will ever add the ability to sync arbitrary directories
and not only the 'Dropbox' one? That's the reason I won't use their service. I
want to see native support that doesn't require workarounds such as symlinks
-- their competitors all offer this feature.

~~~
samspot
Do you have a philosophical objection to using symlinks? As of the last time I
checked, you also need a symlink for Google drive.

~~~
meritt
I personally don't have a problem using symlinks but it's a user-experience
thing. I know plenty of less-savvy friends and family who have a need to
backup and/or share things -- Let's say a 'Photos' directory or maybe a
'Taxes' directory. Telling those people they must relocate their directories
inside 'Dropbox' is confusing and, depending on the source files, can often
break things (in the event of application files that has a particular
requirement for the directory structure)

Trying to tell those same users how to create a symlink is unrealistic and
should not be necessary for a user-friendly backup & sharing platform.

I didn't want to name drop other competitors because that wasn't the intent of
my post, but as you brought it up, I'm talking about more user-friendly
competition such as Mozy, Carbonite or SugarSync.

~~~
samspot
Thanks for clarifying. I agree with you on the usability issues, but would
have expected you to say "won't recommend" instead of "won't use". I have
noticed a surprising number of non-technical (70-year old couple at church)
people using dropbox, but that could be due to access to technical friends and
family (their 25 year old programmer son).

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fudged71
Great idea for a viral campaign

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metra
How will they reclaim the space in two years time for users who, for whatever
reason, don't explicitly choose the files they want to keep?

~~~
camiller
I believe the way it works is you simply can't add any new (or update
existing) files until you delete enough stuff to make the space available.
They won't actually delete your existing stuff. (well i suppose if your
account is inactive long enough and they have sent you enough warning email
they might, way down the road, simply delete your account. But lets face it,
storage is pretty cheap per GB now days. I doubt they will find it necessary
to do that.

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ezpassmac
What other promotions has Dropbox done in the past?

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bankim
That's a great idea to get users!

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dehuayang
It seems that we can't use this in China.

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jefflamth
And... NUS wins!

