Dropbox ditches unlimited storage in its Advanced plan | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox ditches unlimited storage in its Advanced plan

engadget.com

15 pointsgoplayoutside11 comments

Dropbox's "unlimited storage" was only truly unlimited for a very small period of time. By the time I joined in 2015, they had already changed the wording to "as much space as you need" and included concrete limits in the agreement unless customers requests quota increases.

A story I head from my time at the company: MIT was one of Dropbox's first big enterprise deals. Also significant is that both founders are MIT alums. This deal was in the era of truly "unlimited storage". One computer science professor decided to actually put this claim to the test. He wrote a program to upload pseudorandom bytes to Dropbox and periodically download segments of this data and hash it to validate integrity. I head that the amount of data was uploaded was in the petabytes range. He had specific database shards dedicated just to his user. IIRC they rate limited him, with the rationale that they agreed to unlimited storage but not an unconstrained upload rate. Eventually they got the MIT prof to put a stop to this, and I bet this was a significant in changing the wording to "as much space as you need."

> He wrote a program to upload pseudorandom bytes to Dropbox and periodically download segments of this data and hash it to validate integrity. I head that the amount of data was uploaded was in the petabytes range. He had specific database shards dedicated just to his user.

Gotta wonder if he had a personal beef with the founders or with MIT's procurement process. Either way he sounds like a real ass.

I don't think he knew Drew and Arash, that tidbit was only relevant in that the company really wanted to make their alma mater happy. I think he was just curious to see what "unlimited storage" actually meant. Obviously, there is a limit since there's a finite number of atoms in the universe, so what really is the limit of "unlimited storage"?

"Curious" now means obnoxious and abusive?!

Storage space has a cost and network usage has a cost as well, now DB had to pay for petabytes of space for random data. Instead of something useful. Cool

If Verizon is a dumb pipe, DB is just a dumb bucket. I have no idea how you can get so jacked up over the end user "abusing" his access while doing nothing wrong, so you can defend the company who's saying "We'll honor our agreement as long as you don't ask us to honor our agreement."

Sure, he's not doing anything wrong, but DB needs to pay for the increased storage for pretty much nothing. Had someone else needed the space and the random numbers would have been in the way

( Ok we know, most of the time it's anime)

No wonder they put a limit on the uploads instead of a limit in space

Note to self, always put limits (time, be, space, etc) on services

Note to self, don't advertise something you can't or don't actually intend to offer. Not really something that needs a lot of notation, unless one is in the habit of bullshit users via marketing without a whim.

If I want to upload and download random bytes to profile S3's performance, Amazon will happily bill me. A customer purchased a Dropbox subscription, with no storage limit and no per-byte billing. We had no item in our ToS prohibiting this kind of access pattern. In this prof's mind, testing to see if a tech company that promised "unlimited storage" would actually store unlimited data was something useful.

The vibe at Dropbox was more along the lines of "yeah this guy's a bit of a jerk, but we did say 'unlimited'". Moral of the story: never ever use the word "unlimited" in your service plan.*

* at least not without an asterisk explaining that "unlimited" actually has a limit.

Same with "lifetime", especially when it's a service.

It never ends well when there isn't a stable income to offset the cost of lifetime subscribers.

They sold unlimited plans. Someone used it for whatever they wanted to within those terms. How is this so hard to grasp?

And accordingly Dropbox said, oh maybe we don't actually want to offer that and thus shouldn't advertise as if we offer it.

Maybe, he was just trying to answer a question

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