
Updated Dropbox plans get more storage and improved capabilities - d99kris
https://blog.dropbox.com/topics/product-tips/plus-professional-updates
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ProfessorLayton
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.

~~~
darrmit
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.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> 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.

[1] [https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/tag/magic-
pocket/](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/tag/magic-pocket/)

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Barrin92
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.

~~~
troydavis
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).

[1]: [https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-
detai...](https://dropbox.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-
details/dropbox-announces-fiscal-2019-first-quarter-results)

~~~
Barrin92
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?

~~~
chrismeller
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.

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vvoyer
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..

~~~
gopher2
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.

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causality0
>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.

~~~
goerz
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")

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mirimir
What about this?: [https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/08/10/2120248/dropbox-
is...](https://linux.slashdot.org/story/18/08/10/2120248/dropbox-is-dropping-
support-for-all-linux-file-systems-except-unencrypted-ext4)

~~~
staticassertion
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

~~~
mirimir
With LUKS, you'd want to backup the locked partition, perhaps as an image. And
that's just a binary file.

What about ext3, xfs, etc?

Encrypted files (7zip, GnuPG, VeraCrypt, etc) behave just like normal files,
right?

~~~
staticassertion
> With LUKS, you'd want to backup the locked partition, perhaps as an image.
> And that's just a binary file.

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.

~~~
mirimir
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.

~~~
staticassertion
> The key issue, then, is for people running other filesystems in Linux. And
> especially for *BSD users.

Correct.

> Then storing that 500GB (or whatever) file in Dropbox.

Sure, Dropbox can handle that.

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iscrewyou
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.

~~~
spooneybarger
I did bit that bullet. It was worth it for me, but I'm quite excited to be
able to pay less and still have smart syncing.

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spooneybarger
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.

Dropbox Plus, here I come!

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flixic
Fantastic. Just downgraded from Pro to Plus, saving 100 Euros per year. All I
wanted was SmartSync, previously exclusive to Pro.

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MrNobody_01
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.

~~~
iscrewyou
From the end of the post:

> We’re excited to roll out these changes to Plus and Professional starting
> today.

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techntoke
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.

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jaden
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.

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citizenkeen
Wasn't Rewind already a thing?

~~~
iscrewyou
It was called Packrat. I used it a few years ago. I don’t know if it was still
offered or taken away so they can bring Rewind.

------
corywatilo
Can someone post the full text here so I don't have to hurt my eyes by trying
to read that terrible font?

~~~
nvr219
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.

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taylorlapeyre
It's almost like they're intentionally trying to make their website hard to
read.

~~~
keyle
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.

