Take a server with sftp access, so you can mount it locally and browse with winscp if you need to. Put filestash on top and you have a nice ui. That's probably 90% of the original features
- I'm assuming they have the minimal technical skills to make this trivial and accomodate the rough edges that come with it: no easy "signup" flow but creating an ssh key and putting it on the server, for example. Not that it's much harder though
- I'm assuming they don't care about business viability because it's just for them
- I'm assuming they don't need a lot of features: automatic syncing, a simple ui for listing/downloading/uploading
Dropbox has become bloated and has tons of useless features I and most other HN users probably don't care about and find annoying. But the original core functionality still works really well and is a big quality of life improvement over more hacky personal backup implementations, IMO.
So I agree with the criticisms, but I think it's still a useful service at heart and worth the money. It just - very predictably - got way too big for its britches and tried to expand a useful app into a multi-domain conglomerated platform. Steve Jobs's comment that Dropbox is "a feature, not a product" (to which he might now add "and not a company/ecosystem") was pretty much right, I think. It's still a really good and well-executed feature, though.
That said, would I switch to something that was cheaper and gave me all the same core features with the same level of reliability? Probably.
For reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224