
Dropbox for Teams - tilt
https://www.dropbox.com/teams
======
staunch
1\. Having a monthly $75/mo plan would sure may it easier to stomach.

2\. The pricing page is confusing, it looks as if there are _two_ Dropbox for
Teams plans, but really they're just comparing it to standard Dropbox.

~~~
twakefield
I completely agree with point 2. It took me a while to figure out this was a
comparison.

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gcv
One of Dropbox's biggest disadvantages for "teams" is the way it handles
transitive sharing. If I share "Folder A" with Alice, then she can re-share it
with Bob without my permission. I can see that she has done this through the
web UI, but I'd have to explicitly look at the list of users with access to
the shared folder.

Reading the "Dropbox for Teams" FAQ, I don't see if this problem has been
fixed. It seems pretty essential for a lot of "team" functionality.

~~~
kristaps
Should teams have secrets among themselves?

~~~
gcv
Suppose I'm on a team with Alice, and I share a folder with her. Bob is not on
our team. Alice can share one of my folders with Bob without my consent. This
is a problem (consider dealing with temporary employees, contractors, and so
on).

In addition, some teams really need separation of knowledge. Perhaps I have
some financial or contract files which most of my employees should not read,
but I want to share them with my accountant and my lawyer. This feature reeks
of "enterpriseyness", so I understand that Dropbox probably doesn't want to
deal with it, but it is valuable to small businesses as well.

~~~
joesb
If Alice wants to, she can always copy the file out of the team's dropbox
folder and email it to Bob.

~~~
jamesrcole
It's not as simple as that.

Sure, she can do that _if all she wants to do is copy it once_.

But what if the folder's contents are frequently being changed and she wants
to keep Bob abreast of them? If files in it are being changed, and new ones
are added?

Then she has to make the effort to track changes and repeatedly email them to
Bob.

It's a matter of the amount of friction involved, and there can be a big
difference in friction between being able to share-by-copy things and just
giving access to the folder.

------
rufibarbatus
Single plan at $795/year? Yikes.

Dropbox is the absolutely easiest cloud storage service out there, that's
certain, and I'm sure many people will find this a fair package with a fair
price. But I suspect most teams of up to 5 people will find this price way
above the opportunity cost of setting up and getting used to a different cloud
storage service.

It bears repeating: I'm not saying it's a bad package, and it would be foolish
of me to assume that the market will perceive this price the way I did. But I
do think they should have started offering something simpler and cheaper, and
worked their way up to plans like the one they just launched.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Don't think of it as $795/year. Think of it as $13.25 per user per month.

And it comes with 200GB per user and the unlimited version history feature
turned on, so this is actually _cheaper_ than five 100GB personal pro accounts
($19.99 per user per month) and it comes with _twice the storage_ and the
Teams features! A bargain!

The only remaining question is why Dropbox presents the data as they do.
Perhaps they did some A/B testing? My hypothesis would be that individuals and
companies simply think of prices in different units. I predict that the
discussion here on HN will bear this out: Someone will complain about
$795/year but be happy to pay $13.25 per month. ;)

~~~
kamkha
> Think of it as $13.25 per user per month.

They really should advertise it as such.

~~~
mechanical_fish
So, I just saw several nice talks about A/B testing, one of which was by our
very own patio11.

And the way A/B testing works is that _you have to take the data_. Hypotheses
are _just hypotheses_. They can be wrong! They can be really wrong! The data
will surprise you sooner or later.

Here's a hypothesis: If you put up this chart instead of the one that is
there:

    
    
      2GB:              $9.95 per month
      100GB:            $19.95 per month
      200GB plus Teams: $13.25 per month per user, min 5 users
    

Here is what might happen:

A. On the margin, people with very small companies will tend to buy more Teams
subscriptions.

B. However, that effect may be partially canceled out by the large companies
that are subliminally turned off by a page that mentions only monthly pricing,
not other kinds of pricing. Monthly pricing is great for individuals with
credit cards, but company purchasing departments can work... differently. It
might in fact be much easier to buy a year at a time than a month at a time
just because of the administrative overhead and the culture of purchasing
departments, and you'll absolutely have to use purchase orders and invoicing
and get approvals, and if the vendor isn't set up for such a thing the whole
process will be a huge ball of red tape, and gosh look at the time let's go
out for lunch and talk about Dropbox tomorrow, or maybe next month...

C. Meanwhile, some of your potential 100GB customers will be _furious_ that
they are being charged so much money! They will stomp their feet and emit
furious tweets and threaten to hold their breaths until they turn blue unless
they get the $13.25 price.

D. And other potential 100GB customers will look at this and say "hey, bulk
discount!". And they'll figure out how to band together with four trusted
friends, and pull together a year's worth of cash at once, and buy a Teams
account instead, and _whoops_ now Dropbox is making less money on one Teams
account than five 100GB accounts.

...and thus I wouldn't be too surprised if the results of A/B testing say:
Leave the pricing page as it is.

...or, maybe Dropbox didn't actually test this page, and the more-
straightforward hypothesis is actually the one that is right, and they could
make even more money by switching to all-monthly pricing. ;)

~~~
w1ntermute
> D. And other potential 100GB customers will look at this and say "hey, bulk
> discount!". And they'll figure out how to band together with four trusted
> friends, and pull together a year's worth of cash at once, and buy a Teams
> account instead, and whoops now Dropbox is making less money on one Teams
> account than five 100GB accounts.

Wow, this is actually a great idea. I should do this with my friends.

------
joelhaasnoot
Don't wanna be the devil's advocate, but wasn't this around? I remember seeing
this back in February, or a business offering very like it (can't remember if
it was branded "for teams"). What am I missing?

~~~
mbrubeck
It just came out of beta testing. Here's the discussion from the beta
announcement almost a year ago:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986675>

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sunchild
Multi-user dropbox sharing needs file-level access control. Otherwise, any
user in a share can delete or change shared data.

Has Dropbox solved this yet?

~~~
JonWood
I'm curious what sort of situation you have where you trust a user enough to
have a copy of a particular directory tree, with the ability to copy it
elsewhere and edit it, but you're concerned about them being able to make
changes to it.

~~~
shantanubala
Considering Dropbox also has revision history, it makes even less sense to
have granular access control.

~~~
sunchild
Wrong. If I share a document with another person who is only supposed to read
it, and that person deletes it, how long before I notice it's gone? What if
that person edits the document? Will I ever notice?

Saying that access control is unnecessary for Dropbox "for Teams" is absurd.
Here's an easy example: My law partner and I share our documents via Dropbox.
I want him to see my docs, be able to read them, save new versions, etc. I
don't want him to be able to change my directories.

Not far-fetched at all.

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rednaught
"Trusted and Dependable" and "Bank grade AES-256 bit encryption"

Does that mean client-side encryption yet? Businesses are expected to use this
without it?

Any comments from Dropbox staff here?

~~~
namityadav
It doesnt. And this has been a deal-killer for me for a long time. They'll
just tell you that you can use TrueCrypt if you want client-side encryption.

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lien
Do you guys have APIs? I provide consulting at a semiconductor company and I
am currently looking into helping them drive product requirements for selling
subscription-based software online (optimized for their hardware).

Most hardware companies don't know software and most software companies don't
understand hardware. I am interested in finding out whether we could develop
something together out of this...

~~~
drewda
Have a look at <https://www.dropbox.com/developers>

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jcampbell1
How does dropbox handle the case were shared space is much bigger than the
free space on my harddrive?

~~~
cytzol
I'm that case (my Dropbox folder would almost fill up my hard drive, oh the
joys of solid-state drives). You can either:

a) use Selective Sync to only synchronise a few folders onto your computer,
such as syncing the important documents folder but leaving the gigabytes of
videos folder, or

b) have Dropbox throw an error at you and stop downloading files when it runs
out of room.

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yalogin
I am probably being ignorant but why is sharing files among a team such a big
thing? I understand the consumer side of things but the enterprise should
already have at least one server and every desktop OS out there has support
for NFS or some such variant. Why do I need dropbox?

~~~
nedwin
Half of our team work remotely but even in the office we use DropBox because
it means we can use the one platform to share internally amongst local +
remote team members AND to clients.

It's super easy to setup and you don't need to be technically minded to use
it. Everyone understands the folder concept.

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kdkirsch
A) I am a huge Dropbox fan (I stopped by to see their office when I was in sf
a few months ago). B) the price for teams does seem a bit steep for many small
businesses certainly businesses that only have 5 users. C) This is old news.
Nothing new to see. Why was it posted?

~~~
kdkirsch
Sorry, it wasn't clear to me from this link that it was moving out of beta to
open.

And the pricing now seems generous (1 TB to start). I wonder how long they can
sustain that price. I'm worried that they might be biting off more they can
chew with the unlimited offer. In beta, wasn't it 350 GB?

~~~
JoshTriplett
200 GB per new user, at $125/year per user, works out to $0.052/GB/month.
Amazon S3, which Dropbox uses, charges $0.037/GB/month at scale. And that
assumes that people use 100% of the storage they pay for, while most people
don't actually run anywhere near capacity all the time. That also ignores
compression and de-duplication.

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esutton
there should be a variable option where you can trade users for storage. i.e.
i want 10 users sharing 500gb, or 20 users sharing 250 gb. Dropbox for teams
never attracted me not because of the storage size, rather it was the high
price to add users.

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rokhayakebe
Unrelated, but related: Wow, seems like half of the DB team hails from MIT.

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bane
How does this work if I also have a personal account?

