Making it frustrating to collaborate with paying customers of your platform is a sure sign something is rotten.
Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com.
I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer.
Every time I encounter this I reconsider my Dropbox subscription.
[I'm not being polite. #BeingThatGuy :)] My best guess is that they're using their own definition of end-to-end encryption. i.e., SSL for transit + encryption at rest = "end-to-end encryption". Whatever.
https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/
Figure out what you want from the page.
I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit
I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at £1.99 which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
For a £7.99/month plan, the cost of goods sold (COGS) on the actual storage and bandwidth is probably about 33% of that -- and that's based on average usage.
Here's a longer explanation with citations that I wrote in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883#16470633. I haven't looked at their annual reports since then, but the COGS could have easily dropped by 50% in that time, so it might be way less than 33%.
Just based on that 2018 data, the other £5 or so is customer acquisition cost, software development, support, administration, and everything else.
The COGS is a small enough part of the price that, even if they could remove a lot of it (by reducing usage and/or the cap), the absolute cost reduction might be 10% or 20% of the current price.
This is true for the smaller plans of almost all SaaS. The vendor's variable COGS are not what you're paying for. (Exception: cloud services with entirely usage-based pricing and no monthly minimum, like S3. Those are rare.)
If Dropbox were to offer a 500GB package for half price, 99% of their customers that found out about it would switch to that. What's worse, they would likely open themselves up to a class action suit for people who feel like they overpaid for years.
Introducing a cheaper, lower capacity subscription now would be suicide for the company.
That's overly dramatic. Companies cut prices every day.
It is however true that Dropbox cannot compete on price with the likes of MS, Google, and Apple. They can only compete on experience and features, and few people are impressed by their evolution in those areas.
Do we really need a monstruous (and monstruously slow) html view when right-clicking on the systray icon? Do we really need online file-viewers that, most of the times, seem meant to stop you from getting at the actual file?
Dropbox was great when it did one thing flawlessly and got out of your way, while allowing for hackability and true cross-platform support. When they were doing fun things like the easter-egg-hunts and challenges to get extra space. Now they often feel like Yet Another SV App shouting "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I CAN DO THIS AND THAT AND YOU DON'T NEED ANYTHING ELSE IN YOUR LIFE! LET ME INGEST ALL YOUR DATA AND LOCK YOU IN FOREVER!". I still have an account mostly because I have a free grandfathered account, but the minute they turn it off (and inevitably they will, since they are now a Serious Company with Serious Strategies and Serious Spreadsheets) I'll just check out.
On the way out, Dropbox blocked me from deleting 'tex.web' on my local machine, because it thought it owned anything with a '.web' extension.
Domains are really close to 0 support. Can you email support questions when Dropbox starts acting weird? For $10-$20 a year, one support ticket makes the customer unprofitable for the entire year.
Real thin margins, seems gross to try and build a business on the $1-$2 a month thing. I wouldn’t.
Works for a Titans like apple and google because they are making money in other ways..
Reminded me of this story [0] of a team with a 500TB account serving as a database and VCS.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eaphr8/a_dropbox_...
This is a common dev thought. But almost no company in the world is going to care about that. You can onboard some consumer with that point but I hope they don't actually try to sign companies using that.
It actually surprised me how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just worked out of the box, the only thing I had to do was provide my windows credentials (benefits of that sort of integration).
That being said, I've not tried to access those same files from my phone. Maybe that's worse. Dropbox does a really good job of syncing well across platforms.
Most people probably won't notice the difference because the alternatives are good enough now. But if you have millions of files in deep folders, constant changes from multiple devices, or need instant syncing, then Dropbox is still worth the premium for the performance.
1. https://office365itpros.com/2020/04/28/onedrive-differential... 2. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o...
All the other sync / backup apps also work that way after installation.
I actually dislike Onedrive web interface look compared to the top competitors. Photo view often appears buggy when scrolling down (outlook.com file view also has problems). Sharing folders/files as a public link gives full access by default.
Both web Outlook and Onedrive do not seem to have received much updates in the past few years.
That spooked me.
It feels really seamless to me.
That's "thanks" to Dropbox though. Microsoft's "Live" features used to be terrible. It took a competitor to show them how it's done and force them to step up their game.
It's really a user hostile interface and it's up there on my list of things to replace but not high enough that I've done anything about it.
Something similar happened to Evernote -- I stopped liking the brand when I started to feel price-gouged. And then I quit on them shortly after when the apps were not snappy and well-organized to my liking (at the price they were charging me). I was a bit of an Evernote evangelizer too.
For a while I was storing fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?) in shoe boxes, but I ran out of shoeboxes. I've begun using cans from canned peaches and pineapples.
Index cards. Usually 3x5" or 4x6".
Popular for use with the "hipster PDA" (index cards and a binder-clip), a response to palm pilots and the like being way more complicated than necessary for the problem they're trying to solve--seems similar to what you ended up with.
For me Dropbox didn't do that, so instead of happily leaving our existing business account for most team members - we re-evaluated our usage of it, limited it to just a few accounts with the aim of getting rid of it entirely.
At that point it's not something you'd consider recommending it in passing to other people.
Hmm... you may not be Dropbox's most typical consumer! :-)
I go home and my laptop is smart syncing the recently active sessions only which conserves space on the laptop drive but lets me do some small work on recently active sessions.
It's totally seamless and I cannot recall the last time I was even alerted by Dropbox about anything except that I was hitting my 3TB cap soon.
The only issue I ever had was using it on Windows where it would occasionally create conflicted file copies, which was annoying, but moving to OSX resolved that.
I use Nextcloud and there are parts of the UI that defy logic. For example, when I select a file it brings up an "Actions" menu that's hidden via a hamburger button. It has 4 options and I have about 3000px of horizontal whitespace on the same row.
TLDR; It's all hamburgers and whitespace and I don't understand why.
There are at least two big variables here:
1 - Is the new UI actually better? by how much?
2 - What's the cost of change for the existing users?
Bonus complexity: There are large groups of different customers inside your customer base.
If your product is the best ever with no competitor in sight you can annoy them almost indefinitely, the second anything remotely similar appears, all the built up resentment just fuels the migration and it usually behaves like a tsunami, at first it's barely noticeable until a 3 foot wall keeps going and going and you can't do anything about it.
If I'm downloading something from a Dropbox, that's a pretty good sign I'm not going to be working with that person much, or it's a one-off task.
But from what I know the core business and the team are still really strong. They're just more of a Slack and less of a Microsoft, and probably have to adjust for that realization.
Why is this such a huge problem for you? Seems super minor?
That’s a sign that the company’s growth has tapped out and that they need to do shit like that, a solid leading indicator of trouble ahead.
It's not impactful by itself, but the more impactful things are less reliable as signals anyway.
This is in contrast to services like Zoom or Google Drive where part of the sales pitch is that you get a seamless experience when communicating with people - even if the person you're talking to might not be paying, you can guarantee because you are paying their experience won't be impaired, at least for the duration of your interaction.