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Comment by laluser | Hacker News Reader

What do you expect to happen? Continue to host your data for free? This is such an odd thing to write about.

I think the author may not be entirely serious, and may even have been attempting to achieve some level of humor or personal catharsis with their writing.

Perhaps Dropbox shouldn't have promised to keep the files forever then?

It doesn’t seem like the author is upset about this, just interested in seeing what the eventual outcome is. It is interesting to see the tension in their emails between wanting to get the user back as a subscriber and not wanting to continue to host their files for free.

That’s literally what they said they would do.

Companies that offer things for free, I fully expect for them to keep them free forever. If the pay solution is worth it I'll pay.

When they start changing the contract, I find an alternative and use the service as much as I can. My Dropbox is fully backed up but has been full for years and it doesn't matter to me any more.

My rule of thuwb is no tech company's consumer level promise is good for more than 2 years.

That is, if they promise X, I believe they will keep it for 2 years. Anything after that is a bonus.

Yes, but, we still get to dunk on that company and refuse to use them for going back on the guarantees.

Why not?

Many of us host terabytes of opaque data on platforms like GitHub without ever paying or facing deletion threats.

Different businesses. GitHub moat is nothing like Dropbox. Most content on GitHub is extremely small. Terabytes there is an outlier.

You keep your p..n stash on GitHub???

How does that even work, like, can you mount a GitHub project through fuse and put eCryptfs on top?

Asking for a friend.

My question is whether the cost of creating and sending all these emails outweigh the Dropbox recidivism they induce.

Do these emails actually create value or is it a just way to make the company feel better about losing customers?

These emails are automated, so they can send them to many users, and only need a few to come back to make it profitable to do so. Also, the team that is responsible for these emails and for retention (or winning back defectors) may be its own little island and not care about contradicting the forever-promises made elsewhere in the business.

I think he expects them to follow through with the threat.

Should the company not be expected to uphold their promise that they sold him and charged him for?

What promise? You know agreements change all the time right? Google photos, gmail, etc all used to be unlimited until recently. They’re running a business on money not promises from some forum reply.

Make good on the threat I suppose.

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