Congrats, Dropbox (YC S07) | Hacker News Reader

Congrats, Dropbox (YC S07)

siteanalytics.compete.com

84 pointsfuelfive51 comments

I would argue that compete.com stats for something like dropbox are pretty inaccurate. However, that being said, the website traffic is probably much less than the actual growth. I've been to the dropbox site only a handful of times, but I use it every day with the file system integration.

I'd love to see a graph of their bandwidth and storage growth. I'll bet that would be a site to behold.

It's a great idea, and congrats to all involved!

It's better than what quantcast has to say: http://www.quantcast.com/getdropbox.com

yowzers

Although they do have a big disclaimer at the top that the site is not quantified and they have sparse data for whatever reason.

Why is this the number one story on the front page right now?

Don't get me wrong, I love dropbox. I use it everyday. It's a really impressive product.

But 30 points at 9 PST on hacker news just to tell me that dropbox is doing well? Seriously?

It's a conspiracy of course--that's what you want to hear, right? :)

No, not at all.

I'm not suggesting people aren't voting for it, just that I'm not sure why they are.

i use dropbox all the time, it's great. glad to see them doing well.

Definitely! They deserve it, works better than any of the other solutions I've tried

Same here. I set up a dropbox for every team I work with. I think the idea of using a dropbox rather than focusing on syncing computer folders like what sugarsync does will reduce the fear of some people in uploading their folder contents. Dropbox being a folder by itself give people that sense of security and also it's a lot easier to explain!

Yup. I use dropbox every day, and yet I never think about it. Hallmark of something that "just works".

Dropbox here every day as well!

Agreed - I use it nearly daily. I can honestly say it is one of the few apps that has proven so invaluable to me that I have been inspired to tell countless friends, associates and customers about it...

Dropbox is tremendous. I use it for backup and for sharing files and pretty much for everything else that I can.

I've never heard of SugarSync. And Dropbox is still a lot below a site like Box.net: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/getdropbox.com+sugarsync.co...

As much as I like DropBox, you have to take dl.getdropbox.com out of the equation to get an accurate comparison, because dl is used for sharing files with third parties and even hosting files on the web.

In general, it's hard to look at web traffic statistics alone for a product like Dropbox because in some use cases, it can be doing its job perfectly without you ever needing to go to the website. A surprising percentage of our active users basically never go to the site!

Yep, active, heavy and paying dropbox user, but have never been to the website

dropbox is my favorite YC company.

Much more impressive, to me at least: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/getdropbox.com+mozy.com/?me...

I love them, but I worry about their plans to make money...last I heard most people are content with 2GB.

Dropbox is one of my most important tool. It allows me to switch between my linux and window computers without having to manually having to transfer data. It is simple to use and understand.

Does Dropbox ever check their bizdev email address? We've emailed them trying to partner, and our users would all be paying users. Guess they don't like revenue.

The first and largest obligation that Dropbox has is to their users, not to one of the many partnership emails they probably get constantly.

Really, your last sentence there is unnecessary.

If you're posting a bizdev email, I would just assume you would respond, even if it's with a "Sorry, we're heads down on other stuff" response.

3 weeks without a response makes me think they don't even bother reading it.

Your mental leap from "They don't want to partner with my company" to "They don't want to make money" is a bit off.

If they want to reply with the fact that they don't want to partner with us, that's fine. We simply wanted to add the feature to our enterprise application and were ready to pay licensing for 2000 users (and growing daily). The problem is, they didn't even respond with that - so my assumption is the bizdev email is being forwarded to /dev/null at the moment.

If your email to them reflected this tone in any way, I can see why they didn't answer.

There was a point where Dropbox was our very own SVN =)

My immediate reaction, having never heard of Dropbox, was "why not just use SVN".

SVN is for version control of files. Dropbox is simply for sharing/syncing files where you don't need a full history.

I use it on my laptop/home/work computers. If I have a file I need on another computer rather than vpn into work and send it over or ftp into a server and drop it there to pick it up later I just throw it in the dropbox and it syncs to all computers. It's nice.

EDIT: Forgot to mention that dropbox does keep a version history of your files. I just don't use that particular feature.

What I love about Dropbox is that you don't have to check in/check out every time you make the slightest change. The versioning is implicit, which is the way it should be for most personal files (although it would be a disaster for SCM).

I've been using Dropbox to sync shell configuration files across several (4+) machines and it's a dream come true. I now have versioned bashrc files, my vim plugins, on every machine.

I'm currently using Dropbox to sync my todo list (ActionGear on Mac) with my other Macs, as well as my Adium preferences and chat history. So useful.

You could get basically the same service, but uglier and slower, via webdav_svn and Trac. I did that for a while back in ~2005, but man was it slow. Maybe today, you could use Git with a cronjob that autocommits, pulls and pushes every minute or on mtime changes.

Yes, it's great for that purpose, except when two ore more people edit too vigorously at the same time. E.g. a file is updated by your friend, while you're working the same file open in an editor. When you save, you overwrite his changes.

If you have a solution to this problem, let us know... :)

Does this include traffic to the web interface?

It's under the same domain, so probably, yes.

I love how Dropbox has a client for both Windows and Ubuntu. I use it all the time.

That said, I wouldn't pay for this service.

In my opinion, that's a pretty shallow statement to make considering your usage and the amount of time that has gone into such sweet product.

I'm a little sick of the whole freemium mentality TBH. Maybe I'm missing something re: the 'long tail' that very few ever reach.

People don't pay proportional to the effort involved. If they did, you'd be able to charge a few hundred $ for an Ubuntu install CD. But you can't.

Even if you provide an extremely useful service, people may still not be willing to pay for it.

I wouldn't worry about it really. For every non payer, there are more than enough people who see the value of dropbox.

On what grounds is using a free service without paying for it something to be looked down upon?

Someone voted me down, but it's a serious question.

An inherent part of the "freemium" model is the "free" bit. The point is to entice people in further. It's up to you the service offerer to make the pay service so compelling that people want to switch to it. It's completely wrongheaded to look at the people who aren't willing to pay and say they are the problem, or say or imply that they are leaching or ungrateful.

You are enticing people in, if you don't have what it takes to then transform them into paying customers, and you don't want to pay for their ongoing use, then perhaps you should switch to a free-trial instead of a free service.

I will pay for the service, but only after I've exhausted my X free gigabytes. I'm extending that as far as I can by referring people, and thus getting 250MB more free space for each referral.

If you haven't signed up yet, use my referral link, and you'll get 250MB extra free too :-)

https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTQ4MjgzNjk

PS: Thanks to whoever did use the link :-) I now have 4.5GB :-)

5GB... I'm impressed. I was at 3 GB this morning :-)

Thanks everyone!

(PS: The limit is 5GB, so you should use someone else's referral link from now!)

You can use mine:

https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTE4OTk5

And they support Mac too! So I can have my files available all across my machines now (Mac, Ubuntu, XP, ordered by use frequency)

I'd pay for it if they had a plan in between 2GB and 50GB. I want more like 10GB for like $2/month or something - the big plan is too big, so I'd rather not give them $8 extra per month out of the goodness of my heart.

Dropbox my favorate!!! Had recommended many friends to use it and they love them too! Keep going! :)

I'm not a heavy Dropbox user. But I'm pretty happy that it makes my life really easy at times.

Huh. I didn't know about Dropbox. I could definitely use that.

Dropbox is absolutely fantastic.

congrats to my favorite ycombinator product.

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