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Comment by sylens | Hacker News Reader

I was a very early Dropbox adopter but eventually switched to OneDrive a few years back because they bundled Office 365 with 1 TB of storage. I just went and looked at the official Dropbox plans to see if there was a family plan similar to the 5 users I get with Office 365/OneDrive...and found their plan/pricing page overwhelming. There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions like "Traffic and Insights" and the "Plus button" forcing me to keep scrolling just to see that a family plan costs $16.99 a month for 2 TB. No option for a cheaper plan with less storage. I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.

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Dropbox always feels like it peaked early and has steadily gotten worse as they try to add more and more features to it.

> I feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to marketing to consumers here.

I get the impression they're relying on name recognition and first mover advantage to keep the simple users flowing in, while all of the extra features and GUI fluff are built out to attract some other audience that makes decisions by counting up how many different features are listed on each product page.

These days, I'm just happy that I haven't had to force-kill the Dropbox client in many months. I wish there was some way to go back to the days where they just synced my files for me, let me share a few things, and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.

My impression is that they totally gave up the customer market and focused on the business market long ago. So I gave up on them too.

If they were smart they would use their customer market as a loss lead. Years ago I'd use Dropbox for work because it was so easy to make a new folder and add some emails to it. Now a lot of people don't even have the client installed.

I feel like they stopped being relevant when their scavenger hunts ended.

In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones.

Since I joined over a decade ago, they have removed an extremely useful Public folder with the capability to generate direct links, limited the number of devices, and added a ton of features I never wanted from them, like Paper.

Yeah agree, public folders were great. I’m still a user of dropbox since early days but:

- I’m stupid and I kept a git repo in there, it became corrupt. Doesn’t surprise me but wondering what else is fragile in dropbox.

- Uploading pictures on mobile is really really slow. For some reason google photos on iOS is so much faster, like incomparably faster.

- Google photos also allows you to quickly get to all your pictures. Dropbox is… at best cumbersome, at worst really slow at fetching lots of pictures.

- make public folders a thing again for paying users. I’m sure this would create an awesome ecosystem of websites.

I think that they removed public folders because some people started storing static files for their websites in it. As for why google photos are faster... I think it is because Photos resize images on device, while Dropbox uploads them in original size.

In the past it was even possible to host static websites from the Public folder

The speed of Google photos is actually breathtaking. The fact that you can instantly lag free scroll through tens of thousands of images and it all just loads instantly is quite impressive imo.

The problem with some of the competitors is they do not treat photos as its own thing separate from files. I think google did a great job understanding that photos are not just a folder of files but that they require their own dedicated software.

A lot of people had that realization early on. Google had Picasa and Apple had iPhoto, both of which were pretty good photo management software even before the mobile revolution.

We still use Picasa wherever possible.

Dropbox had Carousel, a mobile first photos product that was decently well regarded. They killed it, presumably for cost/benefit reasons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_Carousel

> In my impression, they are removing useful features and adding unnecessary ones.

Also they took away the extra storage I had gotten from various deals.

Saved them 3.8 GB or something, lost them an unpaid sales representative and got them a few posts like this on the internet.

Well, my extra free storage is with me, currently I have ~14,83 GB.

I‘m still at 52gb free Storage. But I just need 2. I’d even pay 2-3 bucks a month to get rid of the device limit. But I won’t pay for a terabyte I don’t need…

My belief is that they're trying to find a way to remain profitable. VCs expect returns, and with Dropbox's main feature now included by many other services like O365 and Drive, I would think that they're finding themselves forced to make such changes whether or not they want to.

This.

It used to be really great, you just have an "ender chest" folder that shows up on all your computers with a public folder that shows up on their web server. They screwed up the public folder pretty badly and I left after that.

Now we have syncthing anyway which is better anyway for a number of reasons and most people know git which works better on mobile devices.

> and I didn't have to fight with their GUI all the time.

I don't even know how to make it open my folder for me in the file explorer any more. I just ignore their thingy and go to the folder by myself now.

Just use syncthing. It's open source and works great.

Dropbox still has the best syncing tech [1][2] which handles complex situations with lots of files and responds instantly. That alone is worth it if you need it.

However the rest of the product is crap. Dropbox had a solid business with a "magic folder that syncs" but has been chasing new features and product lines with little success. Even the enterprise offering was far behind Box.com for years and now has tons of competition.

1. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/rewriting-the-heart-of-o... 2. https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure

There is a plugin for Thunderbird thats integrates with box.com to upload huge attachments there and paste a generated download link into the mail.

> Dropbox still has the best syncing tech

Can confirm without any references etc that I have found it to be vastly superior to all other syncs. Top of the pile for me is that it handles small changes in large files without reuploading the entire thing. That said, I havent used it for years.

Maybe Dropbox's is the best out of a bunch of mediocre syncing solutions. However, I do wish to add that Dropbox struggles with scale: lots of small files slow down sync to a crawl and spin CPU at 100%.

Concretely, I had a certain folder with 100,000+ small files for some research I was doing with a collaborator. It took my laptop 24 hours to sync this folder, and throughout my CPU was at 100% throughout. For comparison, rsync got the same job done in a few minutes. See https://help.dropbox.com/accounts-billing/space-storage/file... , the above terrible experience is in line with this caveat.

Sure, but Rsync and Dropbox are very different. There's really no software option that handles that many small files well with the same features (realtime sync, folder moves, binary diffs, file history, etc).

Rsync is great for taking a snapshot and replicating it elsewhere, which is probably a better fit for research projects anyway.

Sounds to me like git has basically all those features (although you need to have plugins for the binary diffs and realtime would require frequent pull/push/rebase).

Both the official Dropbox client and Maestral take hours at high CPU usage to complete an initial sync of my 7 gigabyte Dropbox with 30 thousand files. Maybe sync is hard, maybe Dropbox's data representation is inefficient, maybe it's because both are written in Python, an inefficient language.

One particular advantage of Dropbox is that it's vendor-neutral and on pretty much every platform I can think of. This is good for people like me who insist on having one foot in every ecosystem. Good luck finding, say, an iCloud or OneDrive client for Linux.

Now if only the iPad client could actually background upload files when you save files using the system file picker...

I’m a happy Dropbox customer because I use all of the 2TB space, they have a Linux client, and their syncing works far better than Google Drive and OneDrive. I can do things like modify git repositories, add and delete thousands of files, have files open for editing, rearrange large folders… - all within the Dropbox folder - and Dropbox manages to sync it without any issue, whereas when I tried the other two, there was a low threshold of “file change complexity” above which they choked.

I don’t use any of the add-on services like Paper.

I used to be disappointed that I couldn’t get an account larger than 2TB at a reasonable price, but then I adapted my workflow to split my data into hot/cold, with hot staying in Dropbox and cold going elsewhere. Because of this I could probably adapt to a smaller Dropbox account now.

Dropbox has the best Linux client of all. That's the only reason I keep paying.

Similar experience. I pay for the 100GB Google one plan which comes with the excellent google photos service and I went to see what dropbox offers and found their cheapest plan was extremely expensive comparatively and they offer less features. I'm just not sure how they even compete at this point when they do the same thing as every other cloud storage product but cost more. And you even have to pay extra for family sharing which is just free with Google.

If you make a lot of changes, the Dropbox sync works. Google drive or OneDrive choke in a variety of situations.

The product sucks in lots of other ways.

I hate OneDrive, and I don't even USE it. I hate it because my corporate users taht use it have a constant stream of issues with it. It fails to sync constantly, the agent fails to load properly, or needs to be logged in again for some reason, etc. It's a never ending stream of failures with the heaviest users.

Yup. That’s my experience, too. Also, on macOS the client UI is horrible. It’s slow and I’ve yet to find a way to open local files that it displays in the list of recently synced files.

I hate OneDrive because Office apps have some extremely strange interaction with it. They are not always in sync with the main client.

There is nothing like changing an excel file, having it correctly modified locally but still seeing the old data in a linked PowerPoint because OneDrive didn't update.

It also managed to lose me a day of work once despite having saved the file regularly. None of my modifications were properly synched to the history.

I also hate how it pauses itself when I'm sharing my phone connection and tends to struggle when I restart it.

I used to really dislike Google Drive before my company migrated but between that and the abysmal outlook search I really miss Google.

Indeed!

Google forced the new Google Drive client on me...

On my M1 Mac it crashes constantly and the Finder pops up Google Drive disconnect dialogues constantly.

Two days into finally relenting and giving the update from Backup & Sync to the new Drive client another try, it's still churning through my files!

It may never finish at this rate it constantly crashes!

Google Drive on M1 macOS is bad. Really bad. :-/

Hmm..The original backup & sync was a resource hog on my M1 but the new Google Drive client is pretty resource efficient.

It's not resource utilisation as such that is the issue!

More that it crashes constantly!

It could be the volume of files it's churning through. But still... 'cmon Google!

If I use new Drive with my personal account, that only has ~200 or so files. Then no real issues.

However, when I tell it to sync to a Google Drive account that has ~200k files.... then it chokes.

I'm also telling it to download the files and store them on an external SSD, so they can be backed up by a 3rd party service!

With a large number of files, the new Drive client isn't having a good day! :-)

+1 Some years ago I tied keeping a "biggish" backup in Google Drive. I really tried. Left the computer syncing for a week, without any progress indicator (only something generic, like syncing). I the end I went with Dropbox. It took a few days, but I could see actual progress happening.

I do not know if this is still the case nowadays.

On the other hand, Google has a kind of pricing gap. You can either get 200GB for $CAD40/yr, and the next storage option is 2TB for $CAD140/yr.

Nothing in between..

Apple has the same kind of gap with iCloud.

This is one of the most frustrating things about being invested in the Apple ecosystem. I've hit the 200gb limit and I'll be damned if I'll pay 330% more for storage that I don't need. Instead I'm deleting my oldest photos from iCloud and moving them over to OneDrive.

Backblaze?

I use Apple One (family) and can add storage on top of it. It’s not very many tiers, but 50GiB, 200GiB and 2TiB. Which puts storage at 250, 400 and 2200 in total. Adding 2TiB is 10 dollars a month (on top of the one subscription) which is cheap comparatively to what it used to cost (iirc). Apple one of course only makes sense if you use other Apple services (I use music and tv+ so for me it’s a win win)

I have no idea how I managed it as it was a long time ago, but I'm on exactly the plan that _everybody_ is crying out for. It might have been the result of some A-B test for all I know. I can't see any reference to it on any website, but it's 100 GB with reasonable annual pricing:

https://i.imgur.com/uTH75ex.png

It comes with Dropbox Paper, etc. Also, Dropbox, if you're reading this and are thinking about taking it away from me I'm switching to OneDrive immediately, I'm already paying for Office 365 anyway.

Also, more proof: https://i.imgur.com/BThdxTD.png

I don't see Dropbox surviving.

They're supposedly breaking even for the first time this month, after ten years, but growth is slowing dramatically. They have over 700 million users, but only 15 million paying users. Growth in paying users from 2019-2020 was only 8%, down from 12% the year before, and the numbers are more dramatic the farther back you go.

They're at cost parity with their primary competitors for the most basic plan ($9.99 for 1TB), but there are cheaper alternatives, especially for family plans. Dropbox doesn't have the economies of scale that Microsoft, Google, et. al. have, so storage remains a loss-leader for them. The only way they can make money is trying to upsell addons that most people don't want. If not for the inertia of being first to market, they wouldn't have many paying users. The year-over-year growth in paying customers says it all.

> There's rows upon rows of features to compare across versions

After you grow as a company and hire lots of engineers and your core product is "good enough", you have to try to pivot/stay relevant/compete/innovate I guess. Lots of manpower (I have no idea how large their engineering team is) need to be kept busy I guess?

That doesn't necessarily mean that each of those features should appear as a different row, or even be different between plans. If you can't figure out a way to make a comprehensive pricing page, the amount of features is not really an excuse.

This one is over 5 pages, with 5 different sections which don't even look triangle-shaped as you can usually expect from increasingly-priced plans.

They have 2500 employees. Why does a single product company with a product that is mostly “done” need those many people?

This horrible obsession with exponential growth. It's not enough to maintain a core team of engineers and pass on those savings on the price in order to gain more customers.

I completely agree with your sentiment, but it puts the company in a difficult position when your competition offers similar functionality for "free" (because you already paid for Office or their primary revenue model is different).

> This horrible obsession with exponential growth

I don't know if I would call it horrible. Money makes the world turn. Capitalism and all that.

Because Google would have more dedicated to the software/sales/datacenters/etc for Google One/Drive/Photos.

They need to compete with what the competition is doing.

I would guess security is a huge part of dropbox and you’re never “done” there. The first dropbox-like that gets breached can say good bye to their spot on the market.

Same story here too, except that we moved to Syncthing. Periodic cloud back-ups with Rclone, in addition.

Love Syncthing. Use it extensively across my Linux-Android-Windows devices. Where I really miss it is on iOS (I have just one Apple device - an iPad) and can't find a reliable Syncthing implementation/wrapper on the App Store.

That doesn't stop me using Syncthing though. I just use my iPad less. Which is a shame. I like the handwriting recognition it has. There's an app called Mobius Sync which promises Syncthing support but doesn't work quite as well.

Thanks for teh suggestion. I was surprised to find out there don’t even seem to be efforts to get the binary running on jailboken devices (unfortunately my knowledge of iOS internals is too limited for that).

Similar experience here: the paid options are way too expensive for private use, when none of the new features has any value to you.

Seems to me that the correct strategy for Dropbox would have been to be super focused on the core product and on not hiring in too many people/taking in too much capital. That would of course have introduced a market cap, but if 1% of everyone had ended up on a reasonably priced personal plan it would have been a roomy cap.

As it was, Dropbox has grown into yet-another ms-office-in-the-sky and there is no way they will make it against their competitors who can burn the cash, and who are slowly catching up on sync technology.

This is really a shame too: Dropbox is just the gold standard for sync. Before Dropbox I was using unison[0] and tried every other sync product, but nothing came close. TBH I am still using Dropbox every day, getting around the device limit by sharing stuff with multiple free accounts...

[0]: https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I'm looking to setup Unison to replace Dropbox because I think their service is a bit overpriced, how did you find it?

Does anyone understand how OneDrive and Dropbox can be so cheap compared to S3?

- 2 TB on Dropbox is £7.99 / month

- 1 TB OneDrive is £59.99 / year

- 1 TB on S3 is $23.99 / month

How can Dropbox and OneDrive be cheaper than S3 at all, let alone after providing value add on top? Is it something to do with lower reliability and availability guarantees? Is it possible to buy direct access to their underlying storage?

https://www.dropbox.com/individual

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/microsoft-365/onedrive/compa...

https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

Most users aren’t storing anywhere close to 1TB. For every user using 1TB there are probably a hundred using 1GB or less. Case in point: I subscribe to Office 365 reluctantly but don’t use OneDrive.

yeah the gym model, in other words

I have 4 O365 accounts and I have 700GB on it myself but the other 3 accounts have nothing. I doubt the average usage is more than 100GB.

because most of ppl buy 1tb/2tb plan on Dropbox and OneDrive do not use all the space? whereas s3 is pay as you go model.

For a personal product with so few size options, most of the capacity won't be used.

Glacier is worth noting as a comparison point, $4 or $1 per TB per month with more limits.

Backblaze said a couple years ago their cost to provide a low-redundancy TB per month was a bit over $3.

Mostly actual use billing vs potential use billing.

Those are retail rates, big users get much better pricing. Dropbox used S3 for years until finally moving to their own datacenter to be more efficient.

And like others have said, users are charged for storage that many don't use so there's a lot of revenue padding. Same model used by the other clouds for consumer storage like Google Drive.

Yeah I found it genius to have so much space anywhere I was for basically free when I was a poor student.

But then I got richer and with a 40TB NAS, a few $ per year hostname, an ip refresh script for the registrar and a vpn server included in the nas, well I have a monster dropbox equivalent and now that I have 5G, I dont even understand anymore why people dont just do that. You lose the ability to access docs offline but then you have massive space online without having to share it with american people (Im in China). In terms of reliability, modern NASes are really good and I only ever lost stuff when I got caught in trying btrfs lol

And with the recent temptation to scan cloud stuff for dangerous data, I feel more at ease with the NAS solution.

My strategy:

- Stuff I am working on, documents, small stuff: iCloud Drive

- Stuff I want to consume (lossless music, movies) and larger files I occasionally need but that I don't need to update: https://www.transip.nl/stack/

- Stuff I want to archive and maybe need to retrieve at some point in the future: B2

Dropbox user for personal stuff for many years, I'm definitely not happy about them adding weird add-ons like Paper or even worse, Passwords. Just focus on file sync/storage/sharing. And I absolutely don't understand the family plan, like you have the same storage (2TB) than a Premium account, but you have to share it between multiple people AND pay more. What ?

Also, I use OneDrive at work and even if I like its integration directly within Office (especially Excel), I have issues daily with the sync. Lots of conflicts, lots of "can't sync"... And even if I keep removing it, I keep getting two or three shortcuts on the left sidebar in Explorer and it annoys me quite a lot.

So for now I'm staying with Dropbox but I will have no issue switching ship if I see something better elsewhere or, worse, if they make bad choices.

I did exactly that. I work at Microsoft now, but two years before I joined I went through the same process but kept Dropbox for many years solely for Linux support. Then they botched that, so I moved my Linux/Mac working trees into SyncThing (since I only need local sync anyway).

How have they botched Linux support? It works flawlessly for me and GDrive/OneDrive don't even come close.

This was back when they removed support for some filesystems. I never went back.

I used to be a big fan of Dropbox, but my problem is that they don't have a lower paid tier like Google, Microsoft and Apple have for $2-$3. I need a little more than the free plan offers, but I don't need terabytes of space.

Are you on windows? Because I tried OneDrive and found it quite slow and a bit flakey when I tried it a few years ago on my Mac: it would get confused about sync state and just stop syncing (much better than losing data!) until I exited and restarted the app.

Also it would silently refuse to sync some files which eventually I realised were not valid windows filenames though they were perfectly fine under Unix.

Has it gotten better? It’s free so I’d be willing to use it if I could trust it.

Dropbox fails to sync some files that have valid names in Windows.

Unicode is hard.

ASCII on the other hand is easy

I would say my primary device is a Windows desktop for the storage but I also use it to sync to a Macbook Air.

Dropbox at least has a Linux client and unlike OneDrive didn't delete all data because some plan expired. The problem is Dropbox is too expensive by comparison.

Yeah, me too (early adopter, paid version). My breaking point was the Windows client kept dying, SILENTLY. When I used it for keeping data in sync with my wife on her Windows machine, this was a total deal breaker.

Using Syncthing now, and it's been solid.

I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client. I didn't want to go to either Google or Microsoft, so I went with Mega.nz and I am very happy with them. I pay around $30/year for 400 GB storage. (most likely a grandfathered plan, not sure of current pricing).

For what it’s worth (not trying to convince you to switch back, just want to provide my perspective), I still use Dropbox on Linux (Pop!_OS 20.04) via their official installer and it works completely fine:

https://www.dropbox.com/install-linux

It should also perhaps be noted that you can't sync to a Dropbox folder on an NTFS drive in Linux with the official client. You can however do this with Maestral.

That's weird, because until a couple years ago I kept syncing the same folder in a NTFS partition in a dual-boot (Linux + Windows) configuration.

> I left Dropbox when they stopped supporting Linux client.

Wait a second. Did they? My Dropbox client is currently working on my Arch system.

At some point they build in a filesystem check and stopped running on anything but ext4 (or btrfs?). IIRC they were constantly giving some notification as well.

It didn't really make sense either and I know several people moved away from Dropbox because they were using xfs. I'm using pCloud with their lifetime 1TB plan.

They relaxed that constraint within a year of that announcement, it supports most filesystems that support xattrs now.

For most users, the 1TB limit is gone and it's almost unlimited now.

I left too for that reason

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