
Dropbox Professional - psychotik
https://blogs.dropbox.com/dropbox/2017/10/new-plan-dropbox-professional/
======
brchr
According to the new plans page [1], "shared link controls" for things like
passwords and expiration dates will now no longer be available on the Plus
plans like they have been for the last 5+ years? Am I reading this correctly?
If so, that is a deeply unsatisfying regression buried in this announcement.

[1]: [https://www.dropbox.com/plans](https://www.dropbox.com/plans)

~~~
superdaniel
I noticed that too and that would definitely be a shame to have such a
downgrade.

I see how Dropbox is trying to diversify their prices based on features. But
honestly, they should try to compete harder with providers like Apple and
Google by providing different storage tiers. Apple has 2TB for the same
$9.99/mo Dropbox provides 1TB. At this point Dropbox has me mostly because of
inertia and their reliability.

~~~
pasukin
It's difficult to compare Dropbox to Apple, Google and Microsoft in terms of
what they offer and for how much. All three of those giants are able to
subsidize their storage offerings. Apple has their hardware business, Google
has their ad business, and Microsoft has their software business. The storage
offerings from all three are used to entice you into using their other
services. It doesn't matter if they're profitable (and I'm willing to bet that
they aren't). What does Dropbox have? Nothing but its storage offering.

~~~
SmellTheGlove
If you're a consumer, it's easy to compare, though. Consumers don't care about
the vendor's costs, just the price and some perception of stability (of which,
if I had to bet, Dropbox and Apple are the most likely to not surprise-
discontinue on us in the future).

That said I'm pretty happy with Dropbox and not going to switch. I'd love
Smart Sync, though, but not at 2x the price I'm paying for Plus right now. $99
a year is great, $199 not so much.

~~~
mynameisvlad
OneDrive has been around for 10 years and we're one of the best known
companies for backwards compatibility and keeping things far past their prime
(Hotmail/Outlook.com, for instance, which has been out for 21 years, albeit
only 20 under the company.)

What makes you think it's going to be surprise-discontinued?

~~~
SmellTheGlove
Probably more detail than I can really articulate, but I've lately perceived a
shift in how Microsoft wants to support legacy and maybe getting more
aggressive in taking a stance in eliminating some.

Right now Microsoft seems really high on cloud, particularly as a means to
make Office a subscription product (which helps with legacy support, as in the
long run, there are no legacy versions to support in this model). From that
respect, I don't think OneDrive is at any risk of ceasing to be a product, but
I do think they might yo-yo the storage quotas and things like that. Didn't
they do that with SkyDrive a while back?

I'd certainly rate their risk lower than Google, which does have a history of
abandoning things that people really like.

Dropbox and Apple are lowest risk for me, but for two different reasons. For
Dropbox, it _is_ their product, and they seem to make money. For Apple, it's
baked into their user experience, and they tend to focus on that - rather than
cut costs and compete on price, they'll make it more expensive if they need
to, but it'll probably continue to work well.

~~~
mynameisvlad
You are right, your quota will depend on when you got the account and what you
did. At various times, we had 5, 7, 15, and 25GB for free. When the big nerf
happened from 25 to 7 (I think that's the one you're talking about), existing
accounts could opt in to 25GB (personally, was not a fan that it was opt-in)
for life. Same thing happened to the O365 offering, nerfed from unlimited to
1TB which is more reasonable, I don't know why anyone would offer unlimited
storage honestly, that's just an open call for abuse.

Edit: For me, after Apple actually decided to integrate iCloud into macOS, I
felt more secure about it staying, but before that it definitely felt like a
pet project that might be abandoned. I still don't fully trust it with my
documents, but since I have an iPhone, I have well over 15GB of photos and
videos uploaded that I'd like to see stay for a while. :)

------
kayoone
I have a hard time with Dropbox' pricing. I was a pro user once, but
discontinued it because i didn't actually need that much storage, i would have
been fine with 100GB for 40 EUR or something.

I pay 99 per year for Office365 which gives me the full office suite for 5
people who can each install everything on 5 devices + 1TB OneDrive. Of course
OneDrive is no Dropbox, but it does it's job and holds the bulk of my data
while i use Dropbox just for sharing.

~~~
1123581321
I would say it's more that you don't need Dropbox's non-storage features and
value Microsoft Office. My $100/year pays for the quality sync client and the
web interface than the space (I have fewer files to sync than you do.)

Since there are probably more people who are paying for quality/reliability
than paying "per gigabytes," they would badly hurt their business by offering
a plan that cheap.

Since OneDrive's lower quality product satisfies you, you don't need what
makes Dropbox good, and it doesn't make sense for them to pursue you by
introducing commodity pricing.

~~~
kayoone
Why can't they offer the same quality/reliability at $40 for say 250GB ? I
value Dropbox quality sync, but i think they will have to lower prices sooner
or later. And let's be honest, it's not that Dropbox is flawless, even when
using just syncing i had my share of problems over the years that i used them
(since 2009).

------
dabernathy89
If anyone from Dropbox is following along in this thread, can you explain why
your most requested feature has been ignored for years?

[https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Ignore-folder-
withou...](https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Ignore-folder-without-
selective-sync/idi-p/5926)

~~~
npkarnik
I don't work at Dropbox, but I believe it's ignored by design. Fewer users
would upgrade their storage to the paid plans.

~~~
dabernathy89
I hadn't even considered that TBH.

------
jaytaylor
Why is Dropbox straying so far from its core mission and competency?

 _Edit_

It seems like they're bloating up the product with features that have little
relation to the core mission of providing secure storage, access, and sharing
for files.

As a user and investor, I'd rather see:

\- Better, more competitive pricing.

Or if that's not an option, at the very least..

\- Stick to relevant technological innovation. For example, wouldn't it be
cool if intelligent caching and network awareness would let you turn a 1TB
drive into a 5TB drive? That would be a much more compelling story.

Given the stiff competition in the space, all this holds doubly true imho.

~~~
varenc
the "intelligent caching and network awareness" is basically the Smart Sync
feature. Dropbox makes files appear as if they're on your hard drive when
they're not and fetches them in the background when you actually need them all
while trying to keep the files you really need locally cached for you.

Edit: there's some cool tech around this you can read about here:
[https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-
pro...](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-project-
infinite/)

------
brightball
I might sign up for this just for Smart sync.

A great next step here would be to venture into the online document signing
space (Ecosign, RightSignature, etc).

You’ve got probably 70% of what you need for it here already with Showcase.

EDIT: Tried to sign up but the linux client doesn't support Smart Sync yet.
Support people tell me it's pending.

~~~
jpalomaki
Smart sync is great news, happy to pay the extra for that.

Setting up on new computer has been painful since full sync takes couple of
days (lots of small files). With smart it would be actually possible to travel
with empty disk and sync needed files on destination.

~~~
hellofunk
> Setting up on new computer has been painful

What about Selective Sync which has been there for years?

~~~
jpalomaki
Not very convenient when you have lots of files and deep structures. Selecting
the stuff you need through that dialog is quite inconvenient (although doable,
this is what I have been using to get the most important files on my computer
first).

------
sidcool
I would love to see Dropbox get into the Productivity market. Google and
Microsoft gives everything an enterprise would need, Storage, Sync, Document
collaboration, Online word, sheets etc., email etc.

Dropbox so far is a brilliant file sync and storage service. Dropbox Paper may
be a start, but if they want to stay relevant, productivity is something they
will have to do.

~~~
bachmeier
I think they have less reason to be concerned about their competitors than
they do about their pricing. $99/year for a somewhat crippled version of
Dropbox is steep.

~~~
monkmartinez
I am not sure what you mean by crippled... nor do I have vested interest in
Dropbox. However, I would be remiss to not mention 1,000GB of storage on S3
would run you $23USD. Now this is before calculating management, request and
data transfer pricing.

I just did the math and now thinking I should pay for Dropbox, instead of S3.

~~~
mediaman
Yes but most people don't use 1tb, which is a problem with inflexible pricing
models like this. If you're using 100 gb, which is probably the more typical
user, you're still paying $100 a year, which isn't competitive with other
options in the market.

------
danieldk
So they created a new Pro plan:

[https://www.dropbox.com/plans/individual?trigger=nr](https://www.dropbox.com/plans/individual?trigger=nr)

Recently, they renamed the old Pro plan to Plus. This sucks quite a bit for
long-time users, since they are only adding new features (smart sync, full
content search) to the new Pro plan.

~~~
monkmartinez
Yeah, I bet they peg the average "storage" per customer around 300GB. People
are forced to manage the space on their HDD and not simply dump everything to
Dropbox. If everyone used the 1TB... I imagine Dropbox wouldn't look the same
pricing wise and/or have some serious heart ache about it.

Like over provisioning in the VPS space... maybe, I don't know for sure, just
throwing this out there food for thought.

~~~
zitterbewegung
I got my Classic Dropbox account upped to around 300GB for life because I
answered a question at a conference. I haven't exceeded it for the last seven
years or so.

~~~
tedmiston
PyCon by chance?

~~~
zitterbewegung
No, Reflections projections at U of I.

------
marcusjt
Dropbox's "Smart Sync" sounds a lot like Google's "Drive File Stream" \-
[https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__drive-fs-
eap.html](https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__drive-fs-eap.html)

~~~
zuccs
Except Dropbox's Smart Sync has been available for a year already.

------
digitalengineer
A showcase portfolio? Is that still a problem in need of fixing? I can't
imagine myself using this and I've been using dropbox for ages and I work for
myself in the creative industry.

~~~
willtheperson
You're on Hacker News and your name is "digitalengineer." You're probably not
their target customer :)

I have a bunch of friends in the creative space who use dropbox exclusively to
share their work. It's a portfolio for them that's easier to update and
control what the prospective client sees. Some of them also have a website
portfolio (typically a squarespace setup) but they take so much time to build
and maintain with fresh work that they end up sending both a link to the
website and dropbox for the latest work.

I totally see why Dropbox is doing this, I just wonder if there are enough
creatives who use it this way to make them any substantial gains or if the
cool kids convinced them this was the most important thing to do.

------
post_break
If you need to, here is how you cancel your dropbox account... they don't make
it easy to find. www.dropbox.com/downgrade

~~~
varenc
Errr, I don't get this reaction. If you were already a Dropbox customer, you
haven't lost a single feature, right?

~~~
dordoka
They quietly removed shared link controls from Plus accounts (previously Pro
accounts). Apparently customers already in Plus will keep that granfathered,
but new customers won't. That's a feature lost, as if you decide to cancel and
comeback, you won't get it back unless you upgrade. They have also negated
selective sync to Plus customers, ignoring hundreds of comments on their
forum.

~~~
varenc
The point still stands that if you have an account, and Dropbox was worth it
yesterday, it's worth it today. Would be nice to get Smart Sync, but there's
nothing you lost to make Dropbox less valuable then it was yesterday. (unless
you were expecting your existing account to get Smart Sync soon?)

(also note that selective sync != smart sync)

------
bpicolo
So they're trying to compete with Behance? That actually kinda sorta explains
the recent, somewhat odd redesign. Not sure how they'll manage to take market
from Behance though.

------
JohnBooty
I'd pay money for a replacement for their old "Public" folder that gives me:

1\. A directory on my drive that's automatically synced to a public folder on
a web server

2\. The convenience of Dropbox's Finder/Explorer integration (right-click to
copy link)

First one is pretty trivial with a cron job (or equivalent) and some rsync-fu.
Second one, not sure. That's basically the convenience factor I'd pay a few
bucks a month for. That and never having to check if the cron job's running. I
want brain-dead simple. Anybody know of something that does this?

Their "link to your file(s) on Dropbox.com, embedded in a fancy web interface"
feature(s) seems pretty useful honestly. _Especially_ the history of who
viewed the file -- that's a real differentiating feature. Different use case
though.

Edit: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted.

~~~
varenc
You can have most of what the public folder offered for $5/month here:
[https://www.site44.com](https://www.site44.com) (Dropbox API app)

If you just want to right click to get a shared link...Dropbbox has always
supported that. If you don't like the ugly chrome Dropbox puts around your
content, append "?raw=1" to the links Dropbox returns.

------
bad_user
I'm a long time Dropbox user, paying €14 per month (including the extended
version history and taxes).

If I upgrade to Pro to try it out and then downgrade to Plus, I'll probably
lose the "shared link controls" feature. To take a feature out of a current
plan in order to convince people to jump on your new plan — that's a pretty
shitty thing to do for any company.

Also €14 is already above the threshold that I'm willing to pay as a
professional and yes, I rely on Dropbox to keep my data safe and for sharing
stuff with others. But I've been doing it in the hope that Dropbox will
include features that I need and I've been glad to support them.

Features like online _full-text indexing_ are missing from Plus and I need
that, because I'm searching for documents on my mobile phone too. And I've
been putting up with it hoping that it will eventually be included.

And now they want me to pay €20 for that, not including the extended
versioning? I'm also a FastMail user, paying around €4 for email. So that
would be a €24 per month for file storage, plus email, forgoing the extended
version history, going out of my own pocket.

Well, Google's GSuite for Business is €9.52 (including taxes), which includes
email and unlimited storage (they say 1TB for under 5 users, but truth is they
aren't capping your account until you abuse it). And on last year's Black
Friday I saw Office 365 Family offers for €4 / month.

Now I understand that Dropbox has the best sync engine. I'll give them the
benefit of the doubt for now — and I might try the Pro plan this month. But if
that Smart Sync feature doesn't do wonders for me, I'm switching, sorry.

Also Smart Sync is not available for Linux. Again, I've been putting up with
their big price because I care about Linux. Not seeing the Linux client
evolving however makes me wonder about their long term support and seriously,
if they ever drop Linux support, I'll drop them like a hot potato.

------
StanAngeloff
I wonder if axing public folders was partially done because of the, at the
time, upcoming Dropbox Professional? If you could share an interactive HTML
mockup as part of the free service, there is little incentive to pay extra for
a professional service.

~~~
varenc
I don't think the decision to remove the public folder had anything to do with
making money. I think it was getting very little use by new users and it
complicated the product.

And these days you can use a Dropbox API app to get something just as good and
in some ways better than the public folder. Check out
[https://www.site44.com/](https://www.site44.com/) It has no problem linking
to free Dropbox accounts. (though it is a paid service...)

~~~
zapt02
I disagree. They haven't publicly touted the feature for years but there are
millions of files that are now dead and no longer accessible because they
couldn't be arsed to keep minimal infrastructure in place to support it.

~~~
varenc
Public folders for legacy users were supported for several years after new
users stopped getting the feature. The actual number of people still accessing
public links after those years was quite low...

But yea, it certainly sucks to have to remove functionality, especially from
such long time and loyal users. I just want to make the argument that this
wasn't done to somehow trick people into upgrading their plans, but with the
goal of creating a better product (which sometimes means a simpler product).

edit: For a timeline breakdown...accounts created after late 2012 stopped
getting public folders. Public folders for legacy users kept working until
March of this year. That's ~4.5 years of support for a feature only accessible
to legacy accounts. They certainly did not foresee Dropbox Professional when
they made the decision to stop creating more public folders.
[https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public-
folder](https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public-folder)

------
ProfessorLayton
Dropbox has been dropping out of favor for me. Their app now has non-
notifications on my system menu (Check out this new feature!), and it drains
my laptop's battery when there's lots of syncing going on. I also I didn't
like how they handled the Accessibility controls fiasco.

I bought my parents a subscription to iCloud and whats really great about the
product is that they don't even know they have it, they just know their
iPhones and Macbook aren't nagging them about space anymore (They're not
techies).

So far iCloud has been working really smoothly for them and I'm considering
the switch.

~~~
i1856511
How did you provide payment information for iCloud for an account that wasn't
your own? Or is your CC the one on file for your parents' account? I want to
do the same thing for my own parents, but they have their own CC on file and
AFAIK there's no way to supply a different one for a one-off purchase.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Family controls let you pay for someone else's storage (if they're on your
family account). Buying then an iTunes gift card works as well.

I prepay my $36/year in iCloud storage for all of our synced family photos by
purchasing a gift card each year and then applying it to my iTunes account
(instead of dinging my CC $3/month, which is just annoying).

~~~
i1856511
Thank you. That's a good idea, and I will look into this. With this method, do
you get an alert or email when your period is about to expire?

~~~
toomuchtodo
Apple sends me an email invoice every month for the storage. If I still have a
credit, it says "stored credit" was applied. I put an annual reminder in
Google Calendar to re-up the account balance with a gift card. If I forget, I
get the American Express push notification that Apple charged my card.

------
zapt02
As a paying Dropbox subscriber for many years, all I see is Dropbox removing
features (like public folders) or making existing features worse (current
situation of search is insanely bad). I for one am looking at alternatives
now.

------
dhruvio
IMHO, IPFS paired with GPG is the best, open source solution out there.

------
post_break
More features leaving Dropbox paid plans. I don't get it. Public folder, the
photos thing, now shared link controls are gone. I'm done with dropbox.

------
d--b
It's not that surprising that Dropbox is moving into this space. They kind of
lost the enterprise battle, and are still very popular among arty people who
need to share large files easily (and without caring much about security).

In a way it's a bit like Apple's move to cater to creative people after losing
the enterprise to Microsoft.

They have some way to go though, cause the brand is not really there yet...

~~~
arachnids
> They kind of lost the enterprise battle

What is this based on? Not saying you're wrong, just looking for some evidence
because that seems like a big claim.

~~~
Cookingboy
Box and Microsoft dominate this space.

~~~
seanieb
Box has a fraction of the seats Dropbox has in Enterprise. And when you add
Dropbox consumer business, it's not even close. It's not clear wrt Drive.

------
sigsergv
I've switched to resilio sync already. It works perfectly even on rapidly
changing files.

------
dordoka
Apparently they now have problems too. Getting HTTP 500 errors everywhere...

------
wonder_bread
So a Squarespace/Wix replacement?

~~~
komali2
Potentially better if there's a way to somehow automatically "blog" about my
new photos on auto-upload.

I don't see that feature, but they're more likely to be able to than
squarespace/wix.

------
joshuamcginnis
Aside from iCloud, are there any other comparable alternatives to Dropbox?

~~~
Digory
Looking for Dropbox alternatives a few weeks ago, I found a consultant talking
about Amazon as a competitor. Lo and behold, there’s an Amazon Workdocs buried
at AWS.

It’s $5/mo per head, 1TB of storage, Mac and PC clients. It is rough around
the edges (nomobile ecosystem, for example) but it seems to be more than
adequate for syncing and some sharing.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/](https://aws.amazon.com/workdocs/)

------
tedmiston
Tl;dr - It looks like a rebranding to charge more for single creative pro
users that previously would have gotten nearly the same benefits of the
personal plan for, I think, half the price. They are injecting a tier in
between the normal plan and the teams / business plan.

Selective sync isn't actually new despite the marketing spin that now it's
available on a per file level. Nor are expiring and protected links. The
webpage builder tool is new.

Edit: Surprised to see someone downvoted this. Look at Dropbox's feature page…
this stuff already exists.

