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Comment by daveoc64 | Hacker News Reader

I use Dropbox as a consumer only. I pay for the Dropbox Plus plan, and that does everything I want - albeit at a higher price than I'd like, but it always seems like their marketing is so heavily geared towards business use.

Every time I go on the site I seem to get some hint that I should consider upgrading my entire team to some enterprise plan.

I miss when it was just "buy a load of space online".

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I was a loyal Dropbox customer early on. At some point, they stopped caring about individuals and put all of their effort (especially marketing) into businesses. As a paid user, it was annoying to see upgrade nags in the app and on the website. I just wanted a damn folder that would sync properly.

That’s still all I really want, but being force fed features I didn’t need pushed me away. After their horrible rebranding, I got sick of looking at the ugly new icon on my iPhone. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I now pay something like $10/mo for iCloud storage which works pretty good. Maybe Dropbox no longer needs (or wants) me as a customer, but it’s something I would’ve happily continued to pay for potentially decades to come.

I recently uninstalled Dropbox after years of use. The upgrade nags were over the top, and the number-of-device limitations on the free plan made it no longer usable for me.

I like the app, and would happily have paid something for it, but as a mostly private user, the lack of a plan between 2 GB / free and 2 TB / $10/month just didn't make sense. $3/month for 5 GB would have been an easy choice.

Now I'm using SyncThing, which I don't love, but gets the job done, is free, and doesn't limit me to a couple devices. I have a folder that syncs to my web server that replaces me sharing things on Dropbox, which works, but is a little cumbersome. (That said, sharing links might be a fun thing to hack into SyncThing.)

Same here. I used it to sync my Keepass database, currently 1.6 MB, across a sliding window of about 10 devices (sliding because I like trying new OSes and phones). That ground to a halt with the 3-device limitation, so I migrated to Syncthing.

I would have loved to pay for Dropbox; in fact, in 2008 I did upgrade to 50GB for one year because I liked the company and wanted to help it survive the downturn. But if I had kept that up, I'd have paid $1,200 by now to sync less than 5 MB.

Interesting you mention $3/month. I pay almost exactly that at vultr.com to keep an IPv6 Syncthing instance running so that a copy of my stuff is globally available.

I have a bit over 8 gigabytes of space in my Dropbox. You could get extra space by creating VMs, then inviting your secondary email accounts to Dropbox and installing Dropbox in a VM. I don't know if this still works.

What really irritated me was the suddenly imposed three device sync limit. Being forced to pay for 2 TB when I didn't need any more space than I already had just to get my files on all my computers really rubbed me the wrong way. Like you, I wish there was a 5 GB / $3/month plan.

On top of that, they're losing sight of the deep OS integration that made them so appealing to Steve Jobs. When a screenshot is automatically saved to Dropbox I'm no longer presented with the option to "Show in Finder" but instead "Show in Dropbox" which instead of snapping open a Finder window slowly launches their kludgy app that isn't at all visually or functionally harmonious with macOS.

How many people do you think there are that would be willing to pay $3/month but not $10/month?

How many people who currently pay $10/month would drop down to a $3/month plan if given the option?

I'm fairly certain the math on this paints a clear picture: Offering a $3/month plan would cost them more than it makes them.

How many people need 2TB or even 1TB / 500GB of St orange on Dropbox? Mostly companies and persons that use it for profit.

For me 100 GB or even 50 GB and no device limit (!) is enough. Give me that for $12 a year and I won't look for alternatives.

How many people would use that? I think more than the $10/month plan.

Although I never had more than 3 devices connected to Dropbox at sane time; but Dropbox Camera Upload used to rename all the photos to time & date it uploaded; I will have same photo with it's correct time n date took as name in my phone, & it's copy with a different name in Dropbox. I used other sync apps to connect & sync my Camera folder to Dropbox, like FolderSyncPro. Apps like that can connect from any number of devices.

iCloud’s $3 for 200GB hit the sweet spot for me.

I’m at the same point too. My Dropbox personal expires in a week and I’m not going to renew for $120/year. They’ve really priced themselves way too high for me. I just need a 100-200gb for photo backups from my phone. With Amazon, Google and even MS offering better pricing I really have not reason to stay.

MS in particular has great pricing. $99/year for 5 copies of Office and 1tb of storage. I can’t see the value of Dropbox any more.

Amex is offering $40 credit in Dropbox; targeted offer.

I ended up doing $3/month for 200gb iCloud, $20/year google for 100gb and $20/year for 100gb amazon. I’ll try them all out and see which I like in a year.

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