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Comment by prionassembly | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox had a discontinuous price increase a couple of years ago that soured me on them. I'm still a user -- the price is still a couple of notches below marginal utility. But I no longer recommend 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.

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> fiches de police (what's the name for that in American? Light cardstock with lines?)

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.

Because software switching is annoying, raising prices is the oldest trick in the book for getting revenue growth when you have tapped out the potential inherent in your product.

Precisely, yes. And then this makes you wary of subscription-based software in general. At one point it seemed that an "extended Moore's law" (if not CPU transistors, then the general cost of compute, memory and storage) and the beauty of near-zero marginal costs would lead to a bright "there's an app for that" future. I remember Evernote launched at some point an iOS app to store food reviews, it was glorious. But now the future seems darker. Bean counters have finally noticed the windfall that's the extreme economies of scale in internet businesses. There's no "singularity" of accelerated tech change. I'm tech-savvy enough to roll out a personal blog stored on my custom sqlite format, but isn't it safer if I just write longhand and file it physically? Use the typing process for proofchecking. Decelerationism.

Same here - a price increase makes you reconsider the relationship you've got with the service you're using. Companies should strongly consider leaving existing customers alone with legacy plans rather than aiming to extract as much revenue as possible.

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.

What is the bandwidth of a peach tin full of index cards, anyway?

"index cards", perhaps?

I believe you’re referring to “Notecards”. In the US they come in 2 common sizes: 5”x7” & 4”x6”

>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.

Hmm... you may not be Dropbox's most typical consumer! :-)

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