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Comment by venus | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand Dropbox's pricing strategy. Free is 2GB, which is no-where near enough. But if you want to pay for more, you have to go all the way to 100GB, which is way too much, for me at least. And the only in-between option is to engage in these kind of games or spamming your friends to try to make them sign up. I'm not going to do that.

Dropbox, if you would just offer $20/20GB and $50/50GB accounts I know at least 5 people who would upgrade immediately. I feel like people want to pay, but such a massive and unnecessary jump in capacity from the free to the lowest paid plan is a real problem. And yeah, I do feel a bit personally annoyed about this - I (somewhat reluctantly) pay for a 100GB account; I use perhaps 10% of it.

I really don't care about this viral marketing to school students. Dropbox, concentrate on your actual paying customers please.

EDIT: I checked and I use 7.0% of my 104.2GB paid account allowance.

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There is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is not good business. People like patio11 make it constantly. The reason is that people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support, and don't actually contribute much to the bottom line.

Ignore for a moment that 100 GB is more than you need. Is $10/month too much for you? Well...

But you don't need to spam friends, there are regularly things like contests (Dropquest 2011, 2012) where you get free space for completing tasks.

And then there's of course the competition.

> There is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is not good business.

I don't think so. Just last week I signed up for unblockus.com; $5/month. Every domain name registrar on the planet - $12 a year or so. Full automated services should not be subject to a monthly minimum, and they shouldn't need support.

> people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support

Do you really think this would be a big factor for Dropbox? If so - just say any under-100GB account has the same support as the free account.

> Is $10/month too much for you?

Well no it's not, obviously, since that's what I pay. But I am the only person I know with a pro account, since it's such overkill, and even I kind of resent paying for so much more than I need.

I like Dropbox, I want to use it. Just let me pay an appropriate amount for an appropriate usage!

> you don't need to spam friends, there are regularly things like contests (Dropquest 2011, 2012) where you get free space for completing tasks

I am guessing you are pretty young. You will be amazed at how quickly your tolerance for such things decreases with age. Free space for completing tasks? That does not even make sense, because if you have to complete some task it is obviously not free. How about I just do my job, and buy things I need (like dropbox), and everyone is happy.

Note, it's unblock-us.com -- and it's a vpn service, not a registration provider if I'm mistaken. Just because an entity exists selling something at $x doesn't necessarily mean it's financially viable. Companies go out of business all the time because they don't charge enough. My company used to sell services at $6 a month and we had 2x the client-base that we have now at 1/10th of the revenue.

If dropbox worked on a usage-based billing model they'd never net nearly as much income as they do offering ~100 gigs to users who would barely use ~10 gigabytes of space a piece on average.

Unless I'm mistaken, the previous poster wasn't calling unblock-us a registrar, just referring to two different businesses that charge less than $10/mo.

Not very important, but unblock-us.com is not a VPN service, it's a specialized DNS service.

Very odd in light of their homepage title being 'smarter faster VPN'.

> I kind of resent paying for so much more than I need.

I wonder if Dropbox might make more money if they charged $10/month for 20 GB, because 20 GB is not more than most people need. (It would be a worse deal, but if the main problem is having more storage space than you need...)

> I am guessing you are pretty young. You will be amazed at how quickly your tolerance for such things decreases with age.

That is the point. As the value of your time goes up, so should your willingness to pay $10/month. This is price discrimination, with price points of $0 and $10.

I think you might have a point. Only now it's probably too late for them to do that, you can't take away what users already have.

You can make a good business on $10 a month, you just need to be as good as Dropbox at customer acquisition to do it. That is not an easy bar to clear.

I agree with the general point, though: coming up with something to accommodate a $23 yearly budget for 14 GB is not a good use of their time relative to, say, finding the next million people who don't think $100 is a lot relative to "all the data my life depends on."

> There is a case to be made that charging less than $10/month for a service is not good business. People like patio11 make it constantly. The reason is that people who pay low amounts are the most demanding in terms of support, and don't actually contribute much to the bottom line.

Well right now they're charging $0 which is even less of a business for the same amount of hassle. I'm in a similar boat, I would like more than 2GB but am not interested in 100GB. Regardless of the money, it's the psychological thing of paying for something that I know I won't use.

The problem for Dropbox is that they use S3. It's really easy to bypass Dropbox entirely and save money, even if you're non-technical. I use Arq on OSX, and pay only for the amount of data I have on S3 (about $10 per month right now). Dropbox's pricing is a race to the bottom.

The amount of people who are willing to set up an AWS account, generate account keys, download an external tool like Arq, and set it up to use those keys...

No, I don't think that's the biggest danger for Dropbox.

It is cheaper to store 100GB in Dropbox than to store your own 100GB in S3. It would cost $12.50 plus transfer costs to use S3. It costs $9.99 and no transfer costs (besides your own net access) to use Dropbox. Dropbox is storing a lot more than 100GB, so they get bulk prices.

They also take advantage of a ton of redundant data.

Not for me, I only back up my original content on Arq (video and pictures, mostly).

For me Dropbox is all about keeping files in sync between different computers and different people, the backup aspect is very much secondary. Any solution that doesn't do cross platform and cross user syncing and sharing isn't at Dropbox replacement as far as I'm concerned.

For pure backup there's Backblaze, which is much cheaper than S3

It's a qualitative difference. With 2 GB, you have to manage and consider which files you want to put there. With 100GB you just put all your files there and don't think about it anymore. I only have 7.5 GB out of my 100 but knowing I can just throw a DVD image or all the photos on my camera in there whenever I want is worth something to me.

The pricing for Google Drive is a lot less lumpy. I would switch to Google Drive fulltime if they only had an official linux client.

Why not just skip the abstraction layer and interface directly with your offsite backup using unix primitives, and tools like rsync ?

I know there's a provider out there that does this ... on the tip of my tongue ...

Because I don't want just Linux. I use Linux, Android and Windows regularly.

Also what I'm after isn't offsite backups but seamless directory syncing (with cloud storage to eliminate the need for peers to be online simultanously), which is related but not exactly the same.

Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive fit this niche generally speaking but Dropbox is the only one that has full coverage across the OSes I use regularly.

SpiderOak does zero knowledge backup & sync across Windows, OSX, and various flavours of Linux, and has Android & iOS clients; 2GB free + 1 GB for each friend you refer, or $100/year for 100GB (deduplicated) and no limit on devices.

The UX is not as nice as Dropbox, but I've been using a free account for about 2 years now and I'm pretty happy with the service and the support (especially given that I'm not a paying customer).

Quirks are that deleted files count towards your quota until you delete them from the list of deleted files (deduplication makes this a bit less painful), and there isn't a way to bulk restore files deleted after a certain time.

The abstraction the whole idea. Dropbox is expensive capacity that has much more functionality than offsite backup. It's multiplatform online shared storage with good disconnected operation support, file history, dedup, etc etc. Different use case.

Do they have an official client for any OS?

That being said--do you know how command-line connections are supported with GD? I'm see a potential open-source opportunity here.

They have only Windows and OS X clients, officially[1], for desktops (Android and iOS are also both supported). They do have a public API, so you are free to make whatever you need to if you wish[2].

[1] https://support.google.com/drive/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...

[2] https://developers.google.com/drive/

edit: here are some various projects I found really quick, including a Linux client:

https://github.com/gimite/google-drive-ruby

https://github.com/Grive/grive

https://github.com/tom-dignan/gdrive-cli

There are official clients for OSX and Windows. I believe there is also an unofficial client for Linux built with the APIs GDrive provides.

I'm another would-be Pro user if they had a smaller/cheaper account but for different reasons. I have the free account with only 9.25 GB of space, and I use less than 1GB. So it's definitely not a space issue.

I want to support services I like. I don't even really care about any of the Pro features; I just want to throw a few bucks their way to say thanks for providing an awesome service. Unfortunately, there's no way for me to do that. Dropbox has made it clear that they aren't interested in offering lower tiers, and so right now, I'm content in using the free service that Dropbox is content to provide.

Why should I pay $20 when I can have 24GB free forever? You don't have to spam your friends, just put the link on your blog or somewhere like that.

I want to pay a fair price for a service I am using. Then I feel like we have a business relationship and my needs will be catered for.

I feel this is the whole point of commerce. Maybe you can wangle things for free, good for you, but it usually means that someone, somewhere is paying your way, and you are beholden to that someone in unpredictable ways.

The link I keep posting in conversations like this is the one where we wrote about the antagonistic relationship that "free", almost free, and flat-rate service providers enter you into:

http://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stora...

It's different with dropbox, though, since their pricing (beyond the free 2GB) is not flat rate ... you really do pay more the more you use ...

Although I suppose that if the range is 10-200 GB, and you're paying $9 (or whatever) there is a pretty strong incentive to keep you as close to the bottom of that range as possible - and you can bank on their policies and system behaviors to reflect that incentive.

But the real worry with dropbox is just the unsustainable business model. It was illustrated so well with the backblaze-costco-drivearound-silliness - storage really costs something, and it's price sensitive enough that you'll drive around all week ripping desktop drives out of USB enclosures ... and if you're giving that away in a bubble 1.0 "anything for customers" model you should be worried.

Consider doing the math on how many paid users need to exist to subsidize each free user. Suppose each free user uses, say, 20% of their space and does every single available promotion, yielding 20GB of space. This means each free user uses 4GB (a huge overestimate, I suspect.) This means that given S3 storage rates (and if Dropbox doesn't have better than the public rates, they're doing it wrong), each free user costs Dropbox $0.22 per month. Let's say that each paid user uses half their space, and that all the users are only using the 100GB plans. Then paid users cost them $2.75 per month. This also assumes that absolutely no data is deduped.

Now, let's assume that Dropbox pockets a quarter of the money to pay salary, other business overhead, and so on. This means that Dropbox needs a conversion rate of about 4% to be profitable. Sounds completely reasonable and sustainable to me, especially given how generous my storage numbers are.

I don't think that this is point of Dropbox way of managing things. They just want to spread the word. Why should they pay big bucks for advertising when they can use their own product to promote the service?

I still pay for things that I need and use. Advertising a link on a site isn't free either.

I don't want to sound like a dick but aren't you admitting I am right?

Yes, you are getting dropbox credits by performing marketing for them, in whichever way is good for you. This might be advantageous to you but it is wrong to call it "free", at best you are paying with some kind of barter.

You're right about one thing: pay for things that you're actually using. That's what modern economy is all about and that's why we had (still have?) a recession.

I don't use or need more than 4GB of Dropbox space. I found promoting a service that I use daily good for me, people that follow me and good for Dropbox because they're getting more quality users from me than from other sources.

The thing you're wrong about is that there isn't really any difference for Dropbox if they offer 20GB, 10GB or 100KB for free. They are still getting payed from people and corporations that use way more than us. That free quantity they offer is negligible.

Agreed. I just used Fiverr to max out on my referrals. Now I have 21.4 GB for $5 and I didn't have to bother any of my friends. :)

except of course now you have an account that can be easily identified by dropbox as "referal abuse" https://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=58068#post-436831

That's an excellent suggestion. I did just the same last night.

Why do you think 2GB free is no-where near enough? I know a lot of users that use Dropbox's free plan and are happily syncing and sharing.

I use 7% of my 12 GB.

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