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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though.

Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.

There's a reason Dropbox won't introduce smaller plans. As it stands the vast majority of Dropbox Pro users aren't filling up their boxes much at all, effectively paying for capacity and bandwidth they're not using, and subsidizing a minority of superusers that are maxxing out. If Dropbox introduced a 25GB plan a vast chunk of their user base would switch to it, Dropbox's hosting costs would hardly change (users aren't using most of their space), but their income from subscriptions would drop massively.

Right. It's not that Dropbox doesn't want to offer less than 50 GB, it's that they don't want to be charging anything less than $10/month. Customers that care about the difference between $5 and $10 per month are not going to make a business rich. You will not get twice the paying audience at $5 than at $10. And it runs into pathological customer territory; statistically in all walks of software and technology, the cheapskates are the greater support nuisance.

And neither are customers paying zero. Personally Im not that thrilled about buying into something where I subsidize a sizable free tier. I love Dropbox, but I can't justify $10 a month for just personal doc storage. Dropbox isnt great for collaborative sharing (becuause you can't have 'shared' space) it isn't a proper backup service (I use crash plan for that) so basically it's personal storage. In that market $5 is all I'm willing to part with.

We use it at my company all the time as shared space. I can't 'share' it to an unlimited number of people, mind you, but I can't imagine a scenario in which I would.

Regardless, it's a pretty good collaborative tool, super for backup of important documents, and yeah, personal doc storage, but as I've spread it out across 6 different PCs, it's a great sync service too.

That said, I'm no longer paying for Dropbox in lieu of Google Drive. Perhaps their cost model is more to your approval?

How do you feel about putting company data on a service like Dropbox which is arguably wildly insecure?
I originally used it for sharing company stuff, and then I read up on their data storage practices and moved my work stuff off there as quickly as I could. The only data I keep on Dropbox now is data I don't care really care about.

By insecure I mean that people at Dropbox are able to look at your data if they wanted to (it's against their policy, but they are physically able to). If they can look at your data then someone who hacks Dropbox can look at your data. This is placing your data at the mercy of the dropbox security team, and the ever mounting threat that the more popular they become, the bigger a target they are.

Contrast that with somewhere like SpiderOak or Tarsnap: all encryption is done on the client side, they have no idea what your data is and no one at the company can find out. This means you get to control your security (picking a secure passphrase etc).

We're using it to collaborate, generally with groups of people. As such, uber-sensitive files tend to not be the types of files we're sharing.

I like Tarsnap in theory, and as a backup solution it's great I'm sure, but it isn't meant to be a competitor to Dropbox for a lot of reasons, but mainly because Tarsnap would suck horribly at collaboration. It's far too private for that sort of thing.

For what it's worth, I've used Encrypted drives on Dropbox, and it works perfectly. It has to sync the entire volume if any one thing changes (for obvious reasons), but that solves the privacy issue. I've used it on the old 20G plan where 10G was encrypted and 10G wasn't, and it worked as expected.

The problem we constantly run into with it in work environments is that any one person is screwed if they don't have enough space for the "shared" stuff, it still all counts towards their usage.

So do I, and I think 99% of all Dropbox users at some point. Why then, don't they do it?

I think, its because this makes getting "free additional space" so very attractive. You envite lots of friends and colleges in order to grow to a few GB [1]. I would guess this is one of the biggest reasons for Dropbox's success.

[1] For instance, I have 8.4 GB by now, without cheating. This more or less meets my needs.

It's a brilliant strategy, isn't it?

User acquisition costs for a product like Dropbox can be fairly significant, especially if you're going toe-to-toe with everybody else in Google.

On the other hand, a gig of storage borders on free for Dropbox, but the marginal utility of that storage is pretty significant for the user, providing a strong motivation to actively recommend (an admittedly excellent) service to their friends.

You get more storage for 'free', Dropbox saves a bucket of money on advertising. It's genius.

Right. And, actually, some people who "cheat" might help Dropbox even more. It used to be quite a common "trick" to pay for Google Ads that link to your personal Dropbox referral link.

Or the old, "refer-a-bunch-of-fake-accounts-and-activate-them-each-on-a-VM" cheat.

I just logged in to my unused dropbox account with my galaxy s3 ... surprisingly, I get 48gb for free for 2 years just for having a samsung phone ... thats a nice touch :)

This comment kinda annoys me. Let's say Dropbox had a 5GB plan for $10 (let's assume that's the price of their lowest plan - I'm not sure). So, people with 4GB would say "this is good value". But suppose they offer even better value and allow 100GB for the same price. Now it's perceived as bad value for the 4GB user, and they want a cheaper plan.

In fact, we had the same problem at my startup. We had a plan with 1-way parallelism, and a plan with 8-way parallelism (we do hosted continuous integration - https://circleci.com). Many of our customers said "oh, I don't need 8-way, so I don't want to pay for it". When we changed it to 4-way (for the same price as 8-way), the uptake was much higher, as they perceived it was something they'd use. Go figure.

That isn't exactly the same what he is saying is that for many of us we can't justify the $10 dollar plan enough to purchase dropbox but would purchase the $5 dollar plan at 25gb or 50gb or half the ten dollar plans size.

This isn't to say it would be a good idea for dropbox to offer this whether they make more money now or with the cheaper plan is unclear to us just many people want a $5/month $50/year plan.

> I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G).

Agreed. For those of us who use less storage (and especially 30 GB or less), Google Drive is clearly the better deal. Although others seem to have experienced problems with Google Drive, it has worked essentially flawlessly for me and, because of that, I plan to let my Dropbox subscription expire.

For every person who wants to keep 100 GB of data synched, I bet there are at least five who want to synch 30 GB or less.

Although Microsoft is not as cool these days, I am liking the new SkyDrive (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/skydrive/compare). (I also use a paid SpiderOak account for backup and sharing.)

Iirc skydrive offers 25 gigs. I wonder why they're saying just 7 though.

EDIT - Yep my account says 25. I'm thoroughly confused.

If my memory is correct, when they merged it back into the Live brand they also downgraded the standard storage space to 7GB. If you logged in sometime during the transition period or clicked on a special link that they sent out in an email you got to preserve your 25GB of storage.

Yes, this is what happened. I have the 25 gig as well.

It wasn't a login, you had to have at least one file on your skydrive before the recent merge to keep the 25GB. Effectively you now can get e.g. 45GB for 10$ a year. Dropbox' old 50GB for 10$ a month plan was a joke in comparison.

They launched with 25 gigs but that was only a short term promotion at the start of this year. 7 gigs is their standard free offering. Anyone who signed up during the promotion period gets to keep 25 gigs free though of course.

Oh I see. I had no idea that it was a promotion. I guess I got lucky. :)

Ditto.

Sidenote: SkyDrive's "fetch" feature is awesome. Can grab any file on my computer even if it isn't in my skydrive folder.

Perhaps they've run the numbers, and decided that a fair price for, say, a 25G account is less than the hassle of having to do billing is worth?

If I may just say: I have Google Drive, and am loving it. It's much cheaper than dropbox, as I pay only $5 and get 100GB of space. That's WAY more than I need, but it syncs to all my devices.

However, I will be the first to say that DropBox has some really great features that Google Drive lacks. For example, there is no public folder for Google Drive, like there is for Dropbox, and I cannot throttle the speed at which Google Drive syncs. With a new laptop transferring 20+GB of data, I unwittingly maxed out a 100mbit connection.

For Dropbox users my question is: is Google Drive not worth it? Do the features offered by Dropbox make it more worthwhile than Google Drive, even if the raw storage costs more?

p.s. the Public folder is going away.

http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-really-removing-...

You can add Public folder functionality to any file or folder. See http://www.dropbox.com/help/167

No, you can't, because that generates one-off links with gibberish in the URL and forces the disposition to "download" instead of just sending the file.

no, it isn't. just has to be manually enabled.

http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=62403&replies=10#...

Does Google Drive do LAN sync? Like any self respecting geek I have far too many computers and LAN sync keeps the bandwidth down, especially on freshly installed systems.

I'm also primarily on Linux so Google Drive is useless to me. (Yes I know about grive.)

My biggest peeve with Dropbox is that it doesn't know about multiple users. I have a personal paid account, as well as a separate team account for work. All of their software and sites work as though you only have one account, which is a huge pain.

Separately they also screw over paid accounts who share folders. For example if two users each get a paid account for 50GB each and the first one shared 10GB of content with the second, then the second will only be able to use 40GB for their own files. So there will only be a total of 90GB of unique storage even though 100GB has been paid for. I understand (and agree) why they do this with free accounts, but their support kept refusing to see why it is an issue when both accounts are paid.

The users issue and shared space issues mean I'm highly likely to move to Google once they support Linux.

My beef with Google Drive is that you can't symlink. I don't want to use my petty internal laptop hard drive for all the space. I need my external drive to be the "muscle." Google Drive won't let me sync that.

I don't know. $10 a month really doesn't seem like a lot of money to me. Especially considering the cost of, say, the computers you're running it on.

It depends on what you are doing with it and what you are comparing it to. For 50 Gigs, its extremely cheap.

But if you really say want 5 gigs, then $10 a month seems a bit high, especially now that Gdrive gives you 5 gigs free.

Its also a bit of a pyschological barrier seeing that second digit in the monthly bill as opposed to say $5/month and knowing that the yearly cost breaches the triple digit barrier.

Hypothetically speaking, you could be running on a cheap laptop that you bought used for some $200. One and a half years of using Dropbox would cost about the same amount.

Realistically though, I totally agree.

It will double the cost of a typical consumer laptop ($500 laptop used for 4 years) or add a third to the cost of a high end $1500 laptop.

There is a plan between the two, but you pay for it with time. https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Referrals

The lack of a plan between tiny and huge may be intentional. Cellphone providers seem to work the same way, offering cheap starter plans with just enough minutes so you either go over each month, and consider upgrading to the massive plan.

If only cell providers also followed this precedent of regularly stepping down the price of all the plans!

That's why I'm using both Dropbox and Skydrive now. --If I'm likely to need to access it on my phone, I put it on Dropbox since the app is nicer, but I joined Skydrive early enough that I have 25GB free, and if I really need more, adding 100GB for $50/year is less than half the cost of what Dropbox charges.

I sent them an e-mail when I was looking into dropbox and they offered me 10G, 20G or 25G for a slightly smaller price.

I'm not sure if the offer still stands, though. I got into it when they just launched.

Edit: Looking at the e-mail they stated this is a one-time limited offer. But still worth a try.

I think the reasoning goes so that of those who are willing to pay something, most are willing to pay $9.90/month. If there was a smaller plan with lower price, quite many would probably go for that one, instead of paying the $9.90.

Somehow I still have a 10GB plan which is sufficient for what I need right now. I can't remember when I bought it and I don't expect it to turn into 50GB automatically this evening..

yes. I want less than 50. Not more. I'd like to be able to purchase with a one-time fee some GBs. (10 for example)

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