I'm not certain if this is "news" per se. It's interesting, and I'm glad that Dropbox is staying kickass, but there's not much discussion to be held, nor is this a particularly newsworthy subject.
a) The 100gb choice isn't listed as a normal upgrade option. People here are likely to be users, and also potential paying users. Classify this as more "useful link" than "news story".
b) This is news.YCombinator. There's nothing wrong with YC companies gaining a large amount of attention here. On the flip side, if it isn't interesting/useful then don't vote it up.
theres also the fact that when you navigate to the normal upgrade choices, the 100gb choice isn't listed. I also dislike the fact that the prices increase linearly. Would it not be reasonable to have them increase sublinearly to take advantage of the fact 1) the typical use of each storage tier will only use mildly more than the previous?
Yeah, this is a common complaint. There'll be a page where anyone (with or without an account) can see all of our pricing details soon (it has in fact already been designed).
As a sidenote, people I've asked who have experience in the freemium space have suggested that displaying your pricing for nonusers serves more than one purpose. There's the obvious one of telling people they can pay for more "features" (in our case space). But there's also the less apparent benefit that often times people (especially more mainstream users) are more likely to believe your service is truly free with no strings attached if they see that there are indeed paid options. Of course this kind of rationale applies more to some kinds of services than others.
If you don't have a dropbox, you either don't know what really good syncing is, or you don't have multiple computers to sync. The latter leaves me with the question why you are trying to look at it anyway.
I say it because I want there to be some users who really think about what's relevant and what's not. Of course, I'm a single user: my opinion is just an opinion here. It's just how I felt.
There was a conversation on IRC a few days ago where people were complaining that "favored" HN companies would get stories up to the top page when the stories were fairly bland. I saw this and thought of that. I'm a proud Dropbox user - it's one of my favorite products - but this doesn't seem like something to revolve conversation around.
At first glance, it seems a touch expensive, as you can get Github and GMail accounts that offer far more storage for less expense. But on the other hand, Dropbox don't have the advantage of being able to assume that most of their customers won't use the full 100GB, as is the case with emails or source control. Also, looking at Amazon's S3 pricing, it isn't much cheaper to use something like Jungledisk with S3 directly, and Dropbox is much nicer.
Dropbox also retains revisions and deleted files, which on free accounts at least does not count against your quota. If this is true for paid accounts, their users can end up using more than what they think they are paying for.
Dropbox is great when you need realtime access to your files. I have a free account and use it for syncning some music and important files between home and work.
If you're only using it for backup purposes, there are a lot of cheaper alternatives. I've been using Mozy (home vesion) for a year and it has unlimited space for $5/month. I don't get realtime access, but for backup it's great. As a bonus, their sync program lets you specify your own encryption key so they can't even view your file data (file names/directory structure is still open).
[Mozy's] sync program lets you specify your own encryption key so they can't even view your file data
... assuming you trust their security, that is. Given that they proudly advertise using blowfish -- an algorithm which even the inventor has expressed surprise that anyone is still using -- and they don't make their client source code available for audit, it's hard to place much trust there.
at some time you're gonna have to trust any cloud provider, irrespective of the encryption(/lack) or the implementation - you send ur data off over your dsl and it's up for grabs. simple as that!
What's the technical advantage of dropbox over, say, jungledisk?
Differentiators:
- Jungledisk uses S3 which I, in principle like.
- Jungledisk adjusts what they charge me with what I use versus charging me a flat rate when I want > 2GB frame
Non-differentiation
- Both use a snazzy multi-OS drag-and-drop widget
- Storage is storage
It seems like strapping me into a one-size fits all "pro" account is a rather dated modality of charging. Anyone clear on that?
I'm evaluating this critically because I need to have a 'follows me' net-disk solution, but have not, as yet, found one that just bowled me over. This link was timely.
