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Comment by telemachos | Hacker News Reader

The idea sounds great, but I really think that they need a few more pricing points/models. As an example, I work at a school. It would be great to be able to use this for students and teachers, but my use case is far more than five users but far less than 350GB of storage needed. Some flexibility in the plans would be great.

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Since you work in education, would you be more likely to be able to call them up and work out a custom license than a business would? I don't really know how that works, but when I was in school it seemed like tech focused educators and other district staff were able to pull off crazy deals and licensing situations at least with some companies.

Probably, but our district tech support staff is way too understaffed: just downloading and installing Python 2.6 (which I use to teach parts of the class) takes a couple of months lead-time. Even single-user Dropbox isn't supported on campus; I can only run it because the installer will work (somewhat) without admin privileges.

Ah, bummer. I guess the last time I was paying attention to this stuff, I was a student, and it was at a time when there were an increasing number of computers in schools, but no one beyond computer lab admins and tech savvy teachers to tend for them. Didn't stop to think that it was surely fully institutionalized at this point. Duh!

Ditto. I'd love to use a shared Dropbox for my videogame programming students to collaborate on group projects, but my total yearly budget is $1000.

Sigh.

Not to stick my nose in where it doesn't belong, but...

Might your students be better served by learning to use a more traditional version control system than Dropbox as a repository for their class projects? Mercurial and Git both have "large file" extensions/forks available that make asset management less painful, and the lessons learned w.r.t. workflow would carry forward into many other, non-game-related programming projects the students undertake in the future.

I've definitely thought about it. However, several units in the year involve filetypes that are particularly poorly suited to git: GameMaker, NeverWinter Nights modules, and Unity 3D all work with large, opaque binary assets.

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