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Comment by laurentdc | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure why people still use Dropbox besides inertia.

I mean, it's not even competitive on the pricing. 1 TB @ 9.99$/mo while Microsoft gives you the whole Office suite plus 1TB of OneDrive at less than that.

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I switched from Onedrive to Dropbox about 3-4 months ago for several reasons.

1) I have zero usage for MS office, and if I did I could just use my wife's version she got for being a student. So this isn't a value add for me.

2) I find the web interface and the windows integration much better on the dropbox side

3) Most importantly, Onedrive has zero support for tracking versions of non-document files. Since I have the extreme need to quickly exchange files between my several computers the last thing I need is for some ransomeware to get activated by some 0-day and compromise my primary backup. Yes I have secondary backups but it is not nearly as easily as rolling back files in dropbox.

4) I REALLY did not like how integrated windows is with OneDrive, going as far as making it a royal PITA to not make it the default save location for new files, and the complication of now having 2 "My Documents" folders.

There were other misc issues that I had with Onedrive that I can't remember at this point in time but I really did not like one drive as a whole and have been happy since moving to Dropbox.

Because it works, it works reliably, and it does so on all of my devices. That isn't the case with most of the competition that I've seen or tried.

I find the interface (both local and web) to be much nicer with DropBox as well, especially over things like Drive.

The price differences are relatively small, and I have no use for the Office suite.

My company pays for both and I had the same thought recently, but the consensus from the web seems to be that the Mac OneDrive client doesn't work very well.

My big problem with OneDrive is that it complains about some of my filenames and won't sync them until I change them to meet their requirements. So, I'm only using their free plan until that changes. I only have a few things there right now.

Price sensitivity to consumer SaaS always catches me by surprise. Ten dollars a month is a rounding error in most budgets, a single grocery store impulse buy.

It's more about paying for something you're likely not going use or need. They only offer the 1 TB tier which sounds great, but I wouldn't be surprised if most people used at best 5-6 GB. Enough to fill the 2 GB free plan, not enough to justify the 1 TB, but there's nothing in the middle.

Also, subscriptions add up quickly. One less is always better.

The competition (Google, Microsoft) can probably only offer intermediate plans because they subsidize cloud drives with other products (Office, ads, etc.) to do a quick land grab. I am pretty sure that it will be hard to provide 1TB storage for $10 per month with heavy redundancy, proper security, support, etc. So they need to get their margin from people two use significantly less than 1TB.

Also, you are not only paying for storage, but also maintenance of network infrastructure and the client/server software.

It adds up. A few bucks for dropbox, a few for music streaming, a few for audible, a few for repo hosting, a few for test vms, a few for something else. Suddenly you're paying annually over $1k for all the services that cost you less than ten dollars a month.

I did mix up consumer and development, but I think the general point still stands.

I did mix up consumer and development, but I think the general point still stands.

I don't think so, especially because you are mixing the two. For an employee that costs $6000 a month, $10 per month per employee that increases productivity significantly is a steal.

If you have a household budget where you can spend $100 per month on luxury goods, you might want to forgo the technical advantages of Dropbox over competitors and opt for a competitor that undercuts Dropbox' pricing.

Ok, shouldn't have mixed them. What I meant is that you can replace the VMs with netflix, instagram filters, or some other consumer services. There's lots of standard luxury goods-like services available. And you're right - you may go with the cheaper competitor when you don't have that kind of money to spend on something not necessary.

The parent said: "Price sensitivity to consumer SaaS always catches me by surprise." - which is what we both seem to agree on - even consumer prices add up and people will go for cheaper alternatives.

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