Dropbox has launched a new password manager in private beta | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox has launched a new password manager in private beta

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31 pointscaution55 comments

I wish they would return to their "a folder that syncs" model. I feel like Dropbox has not improved in any point in the last 5 years. Their core sync engine is truly amazing, but everything else is a mess. They killed that one Mail app, they have this thing called "Paper" they try to shove onto me on every occasion, their desktop app is cluttered with information I don't care about and is now a web app, now they have this limit of 3 maximum number of devices (which they didn't have the first 5 years I've used the service)... the list goes on.

I just want a folder. A folder that syncs.

They should also focus on better pricing/storage tiers. I see 2TB and 3TB as too much for your average consumer.

From consumer perspective - yes, that'd probably bring in more customers who're currently using free tier. But on the other hand a plenty of customers will switch over from more expensive subscription to a cheaper one. They may win some but they'll lose some too and it's hard from outside to say what would be the final numbers.

2TB is a lot.

I have a lot of stuff backed up into my 2TB account, and I'm still floating at only around 1TB of used storage.

But I don't take a lot of videos. I can see people with families who record a lot of HD video use up a lot of space more quickly than me.

I remember really liking Mailbox and I never understood why the acquired it only to shut it down. Sure there are acqui-hires but Mailbox actually seemed like it would be a good component to have in the Dropbox suite.

I think the limit of 3 is because you’re on the free tier. They are trying to transition to a model where they can make money.

I don’t blame them for it, but I did switch to using iCloud Drive instead of Dropbox because I am already paying for iCloud for photos, and the space is so much cheaper for the small amount I need.

They need better storage/pricing tiers. I think very few people need 2TB and 3TB for personal use.

Back in the day, I needed less than their minimum tier offered, and sent support an e-mail, because I heard they would give you an exception if you asked.

They were able to give me a cheaper plan with a smaller capacity. A little later, my storage tier was less than the amount they were offering for free, and they stopped billing me.

I don't know if they're still willing to do that, but that gesture earned a lot of goodwill from me.

I agree with the sentiment but

> Their core sync engine is truly amazing

Compared to current competitors (e.g. pCloud) their syncing has been a mess. It tends to take forever to sync even the smallest files. I have no idea what's going on there anymore.

I've never heard of pCloud before, is it really better than Dropbox?

A folder that syncs, period: https://syncthing.net . No web app, no mail, no nothing; just a folder that syncs.

And the ability to hop on the public relay and discovery servers (and/or provide your own) is really the community spirit at work.

I don't use my full xfer allowance on my VPC all by myself so I flip on my relay every month to use it up.

I would use syncthing and totally drop dropbox if they had an iphone app.

My initial experience with Paper when it came out wasn't super positive.

I revisited it late last year, and I now use it heavily. Their markdown shortcuts are what hooked me. It's not perfect, but I do a lot of my notes in it now.

Can you elaborate on this limit of devices that you're talking about? Are you on a free account?

Your comment about the three device limit on the free tier suggests you won’t pay for just a folder that syncs. And that is the issue. Dropbox basically saturated the market of professionals and agencies willing to pay for just a folder. New features attract additional customers, and they can do this while keeping basic sync solid.

I support their growth because their biggest competitors are Apple, Google and Microsoft. I want there to exist a relatively independent competitor with decent market share.

The fact that the sync "just works" is why I pay for DropBox. I've had bad experiences with Google drive and One Drive (or whatever its called now). I don't mind DB adding new features, but I hope they never take their eye off the ball and lost focus. A password manager and as task manager sound like good ideas for them to implement though.

I felt the same. When they started imposing a 3 device limit, I decided to move to Seattle and haven't looked back. Granted, a self-hosted solution has its drawbacks but I enjoyed setting it up and haven't had any sync problems with it.

I will say that the quality of certain clients is hit-or-miss but overall it gets me exactly what I need: a folder that syncs across devices and platforms.

Couldn't agree more. I uninstalled their app from my systems recently. The client just keeps getting fatter. It now has a full UI for browsing your files in addition to just opening Windows explorer.

This. 5 years may be generous too.

I've been using Dropbox since it's beta days around 2007 or 2008. I'm still a paying customer, but at this point I'm not exactly sure why.

Back in the day it's sync was far superior than any of their competitor's, but now it's largely a bunch of half baked features and products.

Until they recently made Smart Sync available to non-business customers nothing they had released was of any use to me. Mailbox was okay, but Inbox by Google was far superior. I tried using Paper for ~5 minutes. Once I realized I couldn't import my existing .txt or .md files it was of no use to me.

It would be great if I were able to sync any/all of my got repos, but without a Dropbox version of .gitignore this simply just isn't an option. Who wants to sync the node_modules directory? Not me.

Then use sync.com

We switched to sync.com at work when Dropbox first started with all their expansion nonsense. It's been pretty much nothing but trouble.

Since people are commenting on how they hate Dropbox offering additional products beyond the basic file syncing, I feel compelled to say that I really like Paper. I use it for all my personal note-taking, and our company wiki is in there since they make it really easy to share folders with the whole team. It's basically Google Docs but waaaay faster (both in terms of the actual page speed, and the speed with which I can use it due to the more streamlined UI).

It has the best WYSIWYG markdown editor I've ever used which makes note-taking super simple. Good search, a few nice features like assigning tasks to people within documents, etc. but otherwise it just gets out of your way.

I hear they're about to move it into the core Dropbox file system which could be great (it's always been a bit annoying that Dropbox's main offering is basically just an online file system and yet Paper had a totally different folder structure) but I'm also worried that it might make the experience a bit heavier which would negate the main reason I use it.

The due date feature on the checklist items are pretty awesome too.

Like you said, my only gripe is that Paper documents don't have any type of local copy, so if your Internet access is out, you're stuck.

IDK about JIRA, but Trello allows offline access and that’s been very helpful at times (works if you have loaded the board while online fairly recently).

So not too small of a nitpick.

I gave up on Dropbox when I could no longer open the context menu of a file in my Dropbox folder and click the "get link" button and then paste it to someone.

It used to be a very useful piece of software.

This is still a feature. It's actually "Copy dropbox link" but it's very much still there. Here's a screenshot of the feature I'm sharing with the feature itself: https://www.dropbox.com/s/w2wju3uzvz2jont/context%20menu.png...

This isn't a direct link to the image. I'm pretty sure they removed it so that you couldn't use them as an image host.

Yeah. I'd argue this is quite a bit better. People can comment on the image, add it to their dropbox, view entire galleries, preview things like word files that couldn't open natively in the browser. And it doesn't make it any harder to just look at the image if that's what you want.

It seems very reasonable to me that they're not designing for the use case of people who are trying to host images for their website directly from their Dropbox folder. That was never what Dropbox was meant for.

I had the same frustration and I made https://imgz.org/, which I like. YMMV.

My biggest question when seeing this headline was "why?"

> It does make sense for Dropbox to enter the password manager market, considering that many existing passwords already use Dropbox as a cloud option to sync data between devices.

I disagree with this. Dropbox is a file syncing service. The statement above is like "people use Dropbox already to share work-in-progress designs, so it makes sense for Dropbox to make a Photoshop competitor." Or, stretching it farther, "People want their email to be available on all devices, so it makes sense for Dropbox to get into the email service business."

Password managers today are quite good. I'm sure Dropbox is big enough to create a competitive password manager, but is that really the best bet? Put another way: I wonder what it is that Dropbox thinks they can bring to this space?

Presumably the hardest part of managing passwords is the end to end encryption which they have already solved. The sync is done too. they can simply use their sync engine to keep passwords up to date between devices? Would be a great value add to the service as I pay for 1password currently.

Can't shake the feeling this is another "me too" product by Dropbox while the main product (hosting files) gets jankier and jankier.

but that VC money

they'll do email one day

Dropbox is a publicly traded company (DBX) so any desired VC exits have already occurred.

I wish they were privately owned. As a publicly traded company, being profitable is not enough. Grow Grow Grow leads to bad decisions being made.

Don’t use the technology services of public companies whenever possible. Shareholder interests are not your interests.

Completely agree and for most things I use open source. Email and File backup are the only things I pay for. I could even set them up myself but I just dont have the bandwidth right now

They sort of already have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailbox_(application)

In this particular case, as a paying customer of 1Password who hasn't been terribly impressed by their customer support, I think I'd switch to this offering if the experience was at least comparable to 1PW.

I had some issues with 1PW not syncing immediately from computer to mobile, and I posted my annoyance with the fact that the Force Sync button had been removed. The response? Paraphrased, "we took it out because we want people to report the bug to us." Who's paying who?

Lots of negativity in here. As a paying Dropbox customer, I am interested to see what Dropbox can bring to the table. I’ve been stuck on 1Password 6 since they moved to a subscription model. If Dropbox’s offering works well, I would switch.

I use 1pw 7 and don't pay for a subscription.

I do too, but in almost every way it's a worse product than 1Password 6, so I'd recommend against upgrading.

So here is what my family did for years: a keepass DB in a Dropbox folder under a shared Dropbox account. Various Keepass clients on all the devices.

We don't pay for Dropbox, so this is broken now with the 3-client limit. And it was always slightly complicated ... I couldn't get non-techies to try it so I don't really recommend it to others (rather I recommend the lastpasses).

Anyway, this change makes sense to me. They'll make it a notch more user-friendly than using keepass, while raising questions about portability and whether we can trust dropbox with this. Hardly anybody cares about those issues.

Making a shared directory and share it between multiple accounts should bypass the client limit, right?

What I don't understand is why the big browser makers -- Google, Apple, Mozilla and Microsoft -- makers don't just offer this service.

80% of the plumbing is already there, why not just extend the UI? Generate unique, high-entropy passwords and store them in a user account.

Or add this in the OSes themselves -- Apple already does a version of this with keychain. What's preventing them from just copying all the other features of 1Password and LastPass?

Seems like it would do a lot for web security.

Mozilla offers via their new Lockwise tool which is built-in and syncs via Firefox Accounts. Apple does this too with iCloud and Safari using keychain sync.

Mozilla does have a password manager: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/lockwise/

"Securely access the passwords you’ve saved in Firefox from anywhere — even outside of the browser."

here is my guess:

One thing you need to understand is that when you start generating your passwords and not knowing them, you need to have your password manager everywhere or else your are stuck. And it turns out many people use browsers and OSs from different makers. So for example keychain might be fine if you have everything Apple, but if your work computer is a Windows one, then it doesn't work anymore. And I'm pretty sure apple is not going to make a keychain for windows any time soon, just like Mozilla isn't doing Firefox sync for chrome and safari.

(I work for a company that makes a password manager)

Chrome and Firefox store and sync my passwords across devices.

Personally, I need my passwords across devices and across browsers.

I use Safari for personal browsing and Chrome for all work/business browsing. As a consultant, when I’m on site at a client location and they give me a machine I make a Chrome profile and let Chrome sync passwords. But I also work in highly regulated industries so I don’t carry those accounts and passwords off site.

But I also share my passwords with a business partner, so I need something like 1Password to keep, manage and share secrets. And credit card, and addresses.

It I will say that none of the password managers out there have amazing UI. I can’t live without certain features I. A password manager, but I’d consider any new entrant that works better than Lastpass and 1Password. I do intend to try Bitwarden.. I think my password manager license renews soon (but it’s not very expensive).

+1 for BitWarden, it's perfect for what I need. Instant sync across devices and browsers, TouchID support, no cruft or nags. It just works.

I stopped using 1Password when Dropbox started the max 3 devices rule on the free accounts, I had my 1P vault in Dropbox.

I switched to self hosted Bitwarden on my own home. Works offline and if I need to update passwords while out I can reach the server through wireguard.

1. Some do already as noted by others. 2. The password managers domains/problem space is covers parts that a browser never covers. I.e. Phone Apps passwords, Bank PINs. 3. Sync: Phone, Computer, Tablet, other people's phones, other people's computer, other people's tablets.

I do use icloud keychain but it doesn't work on windows which I use often too. I wouldn't trust google with anything.

And that will probably be added to Dropbox client, making it use even more RAM.

Any suggestions for Dropbox alternatives? Funny thing is, I don't need more than 2GBs of encrypted storage, just for some documents to backup off-site and share them between few devices at home.

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