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Dropbox Professional

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111 pointspsychotik121 comments

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

If they drop expiring links, I don't see any reason I'd stay with them. I also have OneDrive, and I like DropBox better, but not that much better...

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.

not only Apple and Google, compared to Office365 for $99 per year which includes 1TB Onedrive + full Office for up to 5 users, i don't see how dropbox is worth it nowadays

Well they have me because Google Sync doesn't seem to work half of the time and/or takes forever to sync on all of my devices, and OneDrive and iCloud don't have clients on Linux (really?)

What sync do you use on Linux then? I am moving over from the Goog to mega. Full Linux support, 50GB, TNO.

Insync is one option (you do have to pay though) that works much like Google's client; there are other command line options too.

I use Dropbox, but I might switch to Mega in the near future. The better storage capacity and leaner UI speaks to me. I haven't had any issues with the sync client so far either, though I've only tried it on Windows.

It’s so bad. My work just switched to Google from Dropbox and it performs much worse. Also everything about the client and the product just screams that Google doesn’t give a crap about it.

Yes, Google Drive is the butt of many jokes in our company too. The main reason we're using it is because Dropbox is prohibitively expensive.

I'm sure not having clients on < 5% of the desktop market will cause Microsoft to become non-viable any day now.

I think it is this kind of attitude that made them miss the boat on mobile

You mean the boat where I can get Office etc on Android and iOS?

In a way yes. If you told people 20 or 10 years ago that in 2017 Apple would be #1 company in the world and have the browser with the second most users (with the first NOT being IE) people would laugh at you.

To be pedantic you mean the POSIX userland. Office (including its OneDrive integration) does ship on Linux, albeit under the Android userland which doesn't help you if you want to run Ubuntu.

At least for the OneDrive for Business offering, it’s easy for them to offer 1tb of storage since you’re never going to be able to be use it anyway, the sync client will crash and burn long before you get near that.

It is not in the same league as Dropbox.

The 1 TB storage that you get with regular Office 365 memberships is the regular OneDrive service, not OneDrive for Business. It works pretty well with large accounts.

Also, it's likely that your past experience is with the old OneDrive for Business client. Last year the normal OneDrive client learned to sync OneDrive for Business data, and reliability and performance improved quite a bit.

(I worked on OneDrive until last summer, but I don't currently work at Microsoft.)

Did they remove the hard limit of 20,000 files per OneDrive? Because if not, one would need to average 50MB per file to fill the 1TB up.

No, my experience is with the ‘modern’ client. It is less terrible than the old one but still unreliable.

OneDrive is no Dropbox (which i use aswell in its free form for sharing) but it works fine for me for general sync and storage.

Unless it's still coming, I still have expiring and password links on my plus plan.

Existing customers who have access to shared link controls will keep this access. They’re “grandfathered” in.

I'd be more satisfied with a company I could actually trust my data not to be handed over directly to state departments without a warrant myself

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.

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.

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?

Perhaps you'll decide to buy a competitor like Dropbox, choose their product as the one true product and close down OneDrive. Like you bought Skype and shut down MSN Messenger.

That said, it probably won't happen overnight and it's not that difficult to migrate from OneDrive to Google Drive or such. Lock-in is low.

I mean, yeah, no product will last forever. MSN Messenger was alive for 14 years and was slowly dying as users were moving on to other services. At a certain point, it becomes unprofitable to keep sustaining a service. But even when it did get discontinued, all Messenger accounts and their contacts got transferred to the Skype service. If you still wanted to talk to the same people, you could just through a different client. You could sign in to Skype with your same credentials and talk to the same people for over a year before that happened, too, to give people time to adjust.

Groove Music is an even more recent example. Yes, the service is going away, and certain parts of the deprecation might be annoying (you have to download all purchased music before the end of the year, for instance) but all accounts can be migrated to Spotify, a previous competitor of the service. It's not like we left people completely stranded without any options.

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.

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. :)

Selective sync can be used the same way as smart sync as long as you remember to untick your special folder on new computers as soon as you install the Dropbox client (arggh!!!!)

This gives them a great chance to focus and improve product.

If iCloud's storage offering matures to be on par with Dropbox Plus, I'd drop by Plus account in a heartbeat.

Dropbox isn't competing on storage alone anymore. It wants to release productivity tools and start getting more into the Business space (which I can't fault, biz is where the volume and margins are at). But for storage alone? Sync fast, don't lose my files, and you can have my money.

I won't dare say iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox are a commodity...yet. Storage is a commodity (S3, Backblaze, Azure, GCP, etc), and the consumer-friendly layer on top will eventually commoditize (and you'll be able to migrate your entire "drive" between providers super quick). The treadmill only speeds up.

I hope people on existing paid plans aren’t having features taken away.

Existing Pro/Plus users (from before today) will keep the "shared link controls" feature.

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.

Same here, if you want a descent size sync storage for your spouse and kids, it adds up quickly.

Given that gdrive and most equivalent offers don't support Linux client, I ended up going with pCloud, and have been really happy so far.

I agree with you on all counts...and the only nitpicky thing i have with microsoft on this is that onedrive has no linux client. And in my family - while everyone else is on a PC - i have my linux laptop. but, yeah for a family who needs office (for docs, school, etc.) and basic storage, office 365 is hard to beat. (And, i should caveat that i am far from the type of person who would be considered a fan of anything that microsoft does.)

My family uses dropbox because of the platform support. And using one drive for personal stuff, and having a business account can be pretty messy from what I've seen.

I have extra storage with google for my photos but I keep my dropbox account for keeping important stuff on every device. In fact I find Dropbox works better on my Android devices than google drive.

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.

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).

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...

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

I hadn't even considered that TBH.

Im not from Dropbox but answer is easy: because that would canibalize on selective/smart sync feature.

I did not realise I wanted that until now. Makes perfect sense

Similarly: "Stop auto-inheriting new folders when using selective sync"[1]

Another many-page thread from 2014.

It's a big problem everywhere, but especially in business settings where there's often tons of data and anyone adding a new folder to Dropbox ends up syncing that new folder to everyone, whether they want anything to do with it or not.

For personal use it sucks when you only want to sync a few folders to e.g. a PC with a small hard drive, or if you've got a data cap.

The new "online only" option is nice but "don't auto-sync new folders" is a seemingly simple option that's been missing for years. OneDrive has it.[1]

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-inheriting...

[2] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Choose-which-OneDri... "If you're choosing folders on two computers and you create a new folder on computer A that you want to sync to computer B, you'll need to go to computer B and select the new folder there."

this is actually fixed with selective sync in dropbox pro

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.

Because companies evolve based on market needs and opportunity.

They're preparing for IPO.

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...

Because their competition isn't just the storage story. Microsoft's counter is Office + Storage + Sway + + + for the same price for a 5-person license (which covers multiple installs per user).

Dropbox can either add features or slash prices.

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.

Doesn't google drive have a similar feature?

It does now, and OneDrive seems to also have similar functionality with the latest win10 update. But many people have bad experiences with the sync algorithm of Google Drive.

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.

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

I'm not, it doesn't cost them hardly anything extra and yet I have to pay twice as much a month just so I reclaim some HD space?

> Setting up on new computer has been painful

What about Selective Sync which has been there for years?

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).

> I might sign up for this just for Smart sync.

Not me. I'd pay a little more for Smart Sync, but not double the price. If they went to $129 on Plus and included that feature, I'd upgrade immediately.

If anything, this thread has me looking at OneDrive because I didn't realize $99 a year got you Office + 1TB of storage. I said upthread I didn't intend to switch, but now I'm really thinking.

On last year's Black Friday, in Romania (my country) I saw Office365 Family offers for $50 and you can simply wait for Black Friday next year to renew.

On the other hand OneDrive's client is shitty and until last month they weren't doing file versioning either. So it's just a cheap knockoff and you get what you pay for.

Microsoft Office being included is cool, but then me and my colleagues are collaborating with Google Docs, which is way better than anything else when multiple people are editing the same files. For presentations I'm using Apple's Keynote, which is the best I've seen thus far. And there's always LibreOffice for those docs I receive.

What I use OneDrive for are backups with https://www.arqbackup.com — if I can find good offers this year, I might renew and keep my backup system, otherwise no.

Synology offers what I believe is the equivalent to Smart Sync. You pay for the machine upfront, a lot cheaper than these services over the long run, and you don't need to trust a third party with your data.

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.

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.

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.

the thing is, many people would be happy with 100GB for a lower price and still having the option to chose betwenn plus or pro. But it's either plus or pro for 100 / 200 per year which is a bit steep.

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.

Dropbox is also expensive for the average user. You either get 2.5G for free or pay $100/year for 1TB or even higher plan. There's nothing in between.

Google drive in comparison has a 100G plan for around $20/year, which is enough for most people. Too bad Google has no delta sync.

Box is trying to do something like this.

They have a challenge in that there are so many (dozens, maybe hundreds) of apps they need so they act like more of a platform for other apps.

Doing an office suite requires a lot of development time.

I used to have both Office 365 sub which comes with 1TB OneDrive and Dropbox personal but I've since unsubbed my dropbox plan as OneDrive now has smart sync baked in with the fall Windows 10 update and they only had smart sync for the team plan at the time.

I still think Dropbox has the best sync engine in this space but I feel the pricing/features is no longer competitive.

So they created a new Pro plan:

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.

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.

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.

PyCon by chance?

No, Reflections projections at U of I.

that's why they don't allow to combine multiple locations/folders for sync(there is a workaround with symbolic links but it's a hack).

Yes. It's the whole idea of upselling to a higher value plan. Upselling from a plan that frankly the majority of it's customers don't need already (who fills 1 TB? I bet many would prefer to have a 100MB, 200MB, 500MB plan for less). $20/month to sync files to the cloud?

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

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

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.

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.

It looks like a bunch of art students are taking over Dropbox, first with dropbox.design, and now with a dedicated way to make a portfolio? Looks like Dropbox is trying to pivot into new use cases.

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

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

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.

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)

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.

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.

You can have most of what the public folder offered for $5/month here: 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.

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.

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.

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/ It has no problem linking to free Dropbox accounts. (though it is a paid service...)

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.

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

My thoughts exactly. This is such a poor way of treating your customers.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

I'm planning on making the same switch. My main use case for Dropbox was having access to my photos from anywhere, but they have systematically hobbled their photo capabilities beginning with the sunsetting of Carousel to the recent redesign of the web Photos page making it impossible to find old photos.

Consider onedrive.

Cheaper, you can have 5seat office license and family plan.

Disclaimer: no decent linux client but macos is more less okeish.

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.

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

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.

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...

> 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.

Box and Microsoft dominate this space.

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.

Curious, who did they lose it to?

Box

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

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

So a Squarespace/Wix replacement?

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.

Oh man, this was the same problem I ran into with my product years ago. Everyone wanted to shoehorn it into a website creator. Showcase (as was my product) is a form of "digital document." Think about sales sheets, proposals, document delivery, etc, etc. Not necessarily things for public consumption, but things that you want to present in an ordered, eye-catching way.

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

Why wouldn't Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive be comparable? They also have online multiplayer document editing experience built in.

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/

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.

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