10 ms·

Sorry, upgrading your Dropbox Business plan will take 11 months

174 points by raphaelj 8y ago

liquidise 8y ago
A shocking number of companies hate money. I know this sounds absurd on its face. But companies should make it as easy as possible for people to pay them. Yet across industries many go out of their way to prevent it for various reasons: security, business models, ease of fiscal reporting, etc. A company's #1 job is, arguably, to stay in business. To that end, being able to accept payments is something each should always be making better, not preventing outright.
- TomVDB 8y ago
  My daughter wanted a subscription to the New Yorker for her birthday. There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker). After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months. How is that possible?
  - bpicolo 8y ago
    I recently signed up for the New Yorker and issues started coming in the next week. Was this a long time ago?
    - TomVDB 8y ago
      This was last year in December. It was some kind of promotion though.
  - pessimizer 8y ago
    Probably lead time on printing. 1) It's a physical product, not a service, 2) it has a short shelf life, after which it dramatically drops in value, so 3) and every overprinted copy becomes hamster cage liner. My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
    - kgwgk 8y ago
      I don’t think weekly magazines are printed months in advance.
      - sulam 8y ago
        I think you're onto something here.
      - rabidrat 8y ago
        They have to build a new mag fab to handle the increase in demand, and those take time to build.
        tinus_hn 8y ago
        Why would the New Yorker print their own magazines? It is much easier to share a resource like that.
  - megaman8 8y ago
    there's a reason print media is going out of business. to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
      I've kept thinking that if I could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        They can already make plenty of money out of you from ads. Far more scalable and efficient, and 0 active work for you to do.
      - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
        > they'd make a lot of money out of me No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
      - dman 8y ago
        But then they would have to write something good.
      - usr1106 8y ago
        > could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't. The Guardian has it. But they are an exception. On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1]. Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper. Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't open at the moment. [1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today. Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book publishers are rather poor.
- guitarbill 8y ago
  As a non-business but paying user, I had the opposite experience. They spammed me with over 10 emails "warning" me that my Dropbox subscription was about to expire, oh and also casually hinted the business plan was "better", even though I don't use anywhere close to the 1TB. Which of course made me cancel/not renew. As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)
  - daveFNbuck 8y ago
    This is the same experience. They bombard you at renewal time, but ignore you and apparently don't even allow upgrades during the rest of the year.
  - preinheimer 8y ago
    I made the mistake of sighing up for a trial of their business account, it wasn't a good fit. I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  This, this, this, this Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?" And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.
- chadcmulligan 8y ago
  Yah, just had this experience with amazon in Australia. They've decided that you can only buy things from Amazon oz, but they don't stock half the stuff. I bought an instant pot from amazon UK a year or so ago and wanted to get one for my daughter. Nope can't do that any more, sent Jeff an email, got some gobbledy gook about how the taxes have to be collected for Australia now so they can't do that overseas. Yet I used to buy from Amazon US and used an Alabama address, they seemed able to apply US state based taxes without any problem. Not only do they refuse to sell things to me but they it seems they lie about the reason. Bought it from somewhere else, Amazon is now my last choice if I can't get it anywhere else.
  - JazzXP 8y ago
    They've actually turned this decision around. In a few months (not sure why it's going to take so long) us Aussies will be able to buy from Amazon US again.
    - chadcmulligan 8y ago
      not UK though
- usrusr 8y ago
  Some more detailed examples for that list of reasons: "you can't give us more money before a sales representative had a chance to upsell you even further, sorry they are all unavailable right now", and of course the personalized variant: "... before the sales representative who called dibs on your business had a chance to upsell you even further" (in that case you might even get deliberately stalled because the transaction volume might be more valuable in the next reporting interval, or the one after. All metrics will be gamed). A properly incentivized sales org would sooner run the company to the ground than allow themselves to get bypassed for even a single transaction.
  - B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
    > All metrics will be gamed That's about it as the modern replacement for 'gnothi seauton' on the Delphi temple ...
- dullroar 8y ago
  This. I have always said the #1 job of a for-profit company should be extracting money from the customers wallets, and it should be as frictionless as possible. But no - examples abound of companies that seem to hate money, as you say.
- stevenhubertron 8y ago
  I have been trying to pay Netlify for about a year now. Their TIN still doesn't match their invoices and we a have been unable to pay. It's totally crazy to me.
- turc1656 8y ago
  You're not kidding. I recently booked a Disney trip for the family and ran into issues at every single stage. First, there was a problem with the airfare not displaying the proper pricing. Then I was told that I had to remove the airfare and book that separately as that was the only way I could continue online booking. When I went to pay, there was a problem with their payment system that took 24 hours to resolve (it was on their side, to be clear, not a bank issue on my side). Then I had to get someone to fix the itinerary within my account because it was all messed up. After that, there was some issue with my account and I got mysteriously locked out for no apparent reason (no, I did not enter the wrong password). And then just today, at 7 AM I became eligible to register for FastPass events now that I was inside the 60 day window for the trip. Logged on right at 7 AM and sure enough, FastPass registrations were the only thing not working on the site. Spoke to chat support and they confirmed it was site-wide and the same thing happened the previous day. They fixed it within an hour and I was finally able to register for the events, but literally every step along the way there was an issue. I expect way more from a $170B company, especially one which families give thousands of dollars to at a time. The fact that I literally couldn't give them money for a full 24 hours and had to spend about 4 hours on the phone over two days to figure out and resolve with them is absolutely mind-blowing.
  - markhopkins 8y ago
    But they got your money anyway. So why would they care?
    - turc1656 8y ago
      Very fair point, but only from one perspective. Yeah I gave them my money, but they did have to pay at least 4 hours or salary+benefits for at least one person just talking to me on the phone. That doesn't include anyone else behind the scenes who was used to help rectify the issue from the technical side. Nor does it include the cost of however many other people also encounter these issues and have to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone with their employees. That can easily add up.
      - 8y ago
lostgame 8y ago
Ha. You know, all it takes sometimes is to make a fuss - noticed a reply from DropBox already - can only imagine someone working there who saw this on the front page of HN and was smart enough to make a very quick reaction. It’s always the strangest when you’d like to give a company more money and they go out of their way to make sure it doesn’t happen.
- wolfgang42 8y ago
  DropBox support had already replied to this tweet 13 minutes before it was even submitted to /new, much less reached the front page. [edited for clarity]
  - lostgame 8y ago
    That's even better news! Glad to hear they seem to be very on point with support, then.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      Are they? It seems the whole thread is about them not handling things correctly on the support ticket. I'd much rather have the issue resolved than get a speedy reply on social media, which usually gets shunted into a private chat where they resume the bad support anyway.
    - joshmn 8y ago
      No it's not. It's just great marketing. There are tons of users who aren't privy enough to call attention to it on social media channels. If they're not privy enough, they just don't. My friend had all her luggage lost by Iceland Air a few summers ago. She spent a week without it. She reached her destination and had just the clothes on her back and her carry-on. She talked to everyone she could. "Have you yelled at them on Twitter yet?" "No why would I do that?" She did, and 12 hours later she had her luggage.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
dylan604 8y ago
That's ridiculous that Dropbox has never thought that someone might need an upgrade to their account before their next "open-enrollment" style system. Just off the cuff thinking would suggest applying whatever money has already been paid for the existing account, prorating it for what has been already used, and then subtract that from the fee to be collected for the upgrade. Then flip the switch in the database. Sure, it might be out-of-bounds for normal workflow. To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded, it sounds like they might have realized how dumb it would be not to take a longer look at the situation. Shows that most corps' pay less attention to the actual support requests coming in than how worried that negative PR would be for having bad support in the first place. Seems like the cart is leading the horse
- ProAm 8y ago
  > To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded Glad to see it takes screaming in the streets to get reasonable customer service for a paid product
  - lozaning 8y ago
    There was once a bug in the MLB TV password reset and login system. I tried for days to get them to fix the issue for me and everyone else by giving them an amazingly detailed bug report. It was like emailing a brick wall to get them to fix anything. I wound up opening a new support request that listed my username, password in plain text, and a note that I cant login, please fix it. I knew they had a policy that if you emailed support with password they'd autoreset it to one and then email that to you. So my issue got fixed, but you still prolly cant use 32 character password on their site.
    - anoncoward111 8y ago
      Fun fact, MLB TV runs a ton of Oracle software. Seems that their IT dept is really good at making repeated, pitiful decisions
- TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
raphaelj 8y ago
We currently have a Dropbox Business account with 16 users. We use their API to do some data pre-processing in the cloud on some of the data when it is being pushed in the Dropbox. A few days ago we reach the monthly 25.000 API calls limit, and contacted support to upgrade our plan, as they tell us to do on their pricing page [1]. That is the response we got earlier today. --- [1] https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
- gnulinux 8y ago
  Wait, I'm much more curious what are you guys gonna do now? Sure, Dropbox screwed up and they can't give you more than 25000 API calls per month this year, because their system is poorly designed and not ready. But are you capable of overcoming the issue that now you have no programmatic connection to your cloud? I'm genuinely very curious.
  - coldcode 8y ago
    How can a public company not be ready to upgrade a customer?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - bostik 8y ago
      Enough mindshare in the market, combined with the fact that they've already had the liquidation event?
      - nl 8y ago
        I think you mean a liquidity event...
        serf 8y ago
        the liquidation event comes after the notoriety for bad customer service ;)
StavrosK 8y ago
Is Dropbox significantly better than Nextcloud at this point? I switched to Nextcloud because I hated the Android app and it's been great so far. Why not just switch to that?
- beart 8y ago
  Advice like this is always funny to me. It's kind of like being upset about the low quality of vegetables at the super market and being asked why you don't just grow your own in your backyard. I'm sure anyone who is technology savvy could switch to Nextcloud easily enough, but that isn't the point. Dropbox was probably chosen because the money is worth the convenience.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    What convenience, though? You can pay for already-hosted Nextcloud and just install and use it.
  - AC_Fan 8y ago
    Hetzner has a hosted NextCloud instance at more than competitive pricing (compared to Dropbox).
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- fencepost 8y ago
  If you don't have hangups about Microsoft you can also get Onedrive - 1 TB for ~$5/month, and they even throw in Office if you want it. Files On Demand also seems to work pretty well on Windows 10 boxes and is included, I think the Dropbox equivalent is only on the business plans.
preinheimer 8y ago
Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great support, just attentive marketing. For every case that has a great resolution after coverage on twitter/facebook/hacker news/local news station there's a hundred that languished unsolved and customer screwed.
- trhway 8y ago
  >Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great support, just attentive marketing. On other side may be they just streamlined the operations and the social media is the [only] customer case support database. If you look at various bug/case/issue databases with issue voting, discussions, etc - they do start to look like social media. So there is some convergence here. And may be Twitter can pivot and add issues/case priority/severity, release fixed in and other fields :) Imagine Periscope allowing to observe developers fixing your issues... >For every case that has a great resolution after coverage on twitter/facebook/hacker news/local news station there's a hundred that languished unsolved and customer screwed. sounds like my BugZilla, in principle if not in actual numbers :)
  - mikehollinger 8y ago
    If you want to see the exact WRONG way to do this, check out Straight Talk Wireless. [1] Instead of posting an actual answer, their response throughout their forum is thousands of identical "check your direct message" replies. Someone's likely getting judged on response times, not quality of response. I gave Straight Talk a try a few years ago. It was great, until it wasn't great, and I needed some help with my voicemail. I eventually gave up, and when I went back to a "major" carrier I took pleasure in trashing the Straight Talk sim card. [1] https://www.straighttalkwirelessforum.com/search.php?keywords=%22To+further+assist+you%2C+please+check%22 https://www.straighttalkwirelessforum.com/search.php?keyword...
    - trhway 8y ago
      >Instead of posting an actual answer, their response throughout their forum is thousands of identical "check your direct message" replies. Someone's likely getting judged on response times, not quality of response. reminded how back at Sun bunch of years ago we had "forum activity (number of posts)" as a performance review metric. They should have used the number of cobras instead - at least Sun would have made some money of the cobras skins and meat :)
acjohnson55 8y ago
My biggest Dropbox frustration is that it's impossible to simply buy more space on a personal account. I suspect it's because most paying people don't come close to using 1TB, but someone who buys 2TB is certainly going to use more than 50% of it. Still, it's damn frustrating that it's not an option at all.
- jl6 8y ago
  They now have a 2TB plan. It costs twice as much. Ironically, this is exactly what I asked for, but that was 3 years ago and since they couldn’t do it back then, I made other arrangements, and now that it’s finally available I don’t need it.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Good to know! This didn't exist last I checked.
amelius 8y ago
Unfortunately moving your data out of Dropbox also takes 11 months ...
chmod775 8y ago
Did anyone else notice how much better the mobile twitter version is even when using it on a desktop? Browsing it is so much faster and responsive.
- londons_explore 8y ago
  Yes... But it still takes 7 seconds to load!
ldarby 8y ago
This is symptomatic of hiring people to do tech support whose only ability is to follow a script. Usually they can't even understand an if statement in the script. They lack the basic ability to think. I work in tech support myself (L3) and am constantly shocked at the brain-dead, useless and actively unhelpful things the lower level staff say to customers.
quantumsequoia 8y ago
I can't reccomend Box enough for businesses. It's an enterprise facing alternative to Dropbox. It has a lot more features companies will find useful Dropbox is first and foremost a consumer company

174 points by raphaelj 8y ago

A shocking number of companies hate money. I know this sounds absurd on its face. But companies should make it as easy as possible for people to pay them. Yet across industries many go out of their way to prevent it for various reasons: security, business models, ease of fiscal reporting, etc. A company's #1 job is, arguably, to stay in business. To that end, being able to accept payments is something each should always be making better, not preventing outright.

TomVDB 8y ago
My daughter wanted a subscription to the New Yorker for her birthday. There were some promotions on their website (not some shady magazine broker). After going through all the motions, they happily tell you that you can expect the first issue in your mailbox about 3 months later... 3 months. How is that possible?
- bpicolo 8y ago
  I recently signed up for the New Yorker and issues started coming in the next week. Was this a long time ago?
  - TomVDB 8y ago
    This was last year in December. It was some kind of promotion though.
- pessimizer 8y ago
  Probably lead time on printing. 1) It's a physical product, not a service, 2) it has a short shelf life, after which it dramatically drops in value, so 3) and every overprinted copy becomes hamster cage liner. My guess is that they grant instant access to the paywalled articles on the site, though. If they don't, they're being stupid, trying to keep people from getting three months of minuscule bandwidth per subscription for free and also being unwilling to price it in at however much they value it.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
    I don’t think weekly magazines are printed months in advance.
    - sulam 8y ago
      I think you're onto something here.
    - rabidrat 8y ago
      They have to build a new mag fab to handle the increase in demand, and those take time to build.
      - tinus_hn 8y ago
        Why would the New Yorker print their own magazines? It is much easier to share a resource like that.
- megaman8 8y ago
  there's a reason print media is going out of business. to this day, I still can't pay for wall street journal article with a micropayment. and no, i'm not going to pay them 100$s of dollars for a 6 month subscription to read a single article.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago
    I've kept thinking that if I could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't.
    - manigandham 8y ago
      They can already make plenty of money out of you from ads. Far more scalable and efficient, and 0 active work for you to do.
    - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
      > they'd make a lot of money out of me No they wouldn't. Subscriptions for journalism make sense for the same reason endowed chairs in academia make sense. Advertising is almost always a better model than micropayments for the simple reason that it's (a) more reliable and (b) has fewer support costs.
    - dman 8y ago
      But then they would have to write something good.
    - usr1106 8y ago
      > could just tip a paper a dollar or so when I read something good, they'd make a lot of money out of me. But I can't. The Guardian has it. But they are an exception. On the other hand I tried to make a paper subscription of the Guardian [1]. Despite searching for an hour, I could find no way how to order the paper. Maybe another case of rejecting the customer willing to pay, because nobody could possibly want that service... Should have called them, but they weren't open at the moment. [1] for my daugther who wants to prepare for her English exam. Freshness of the news is less an issue than having it it in a comfortable format for studying. She hates that many of her school books are only online today. Online could have some advantages, but most implementations by school book publishers are rather poor.
guitarbill 8y ago
As a non-business but paying user, I had the opposite experience. They spammed me with over 10 emails "warning" me that my Dropbox subscription was about to expire, oh and also casually hinted the business plan was "better", even though I don't use anywhere close to the 1TB. Which of course made me cancel/not renew. As much as a hate to say this, but their tech is solid and isn't the problem. It seems to be figuring out what the value-add is for different groups, and how to market it effectively. Or maybe cloud storage is saturated and not that interesting. (The size of SSDs also doesn't help for individual accounts which is either 1TB or nothing.)
- daveFNbuck 8y ago
  This is the same experience. They bombard you at renewal time, but ignore you and apparently don't even allow upgrades during the rest of the year.
- preinheimer 8y ago
  I made the mistake of sighing up for a trial of their business account, it wasn't a good fit. I tried for _months_ to get them to stop emailing me. Different sales reps, various mailing lists, drip campaigns, I unsubscribed from them all but it kept coming. I eventually forwarded like 13 attempts at unsubscribing to their CEO with a plea to help and it stopped.
raverbashing 8y ago
This, this, this, this Every business bureaucracy should be evaluated under this metric. "Are we making it harder for people to pay us? Are we making it harder for people to pay us more money?" And no, never make it harder for customers to pay you less or to stop paying you. It's short term thinking; a customer who has a painful experience when they want to stopping paying you is a customer who will think twice about paying you again.
chadcmulligan 8y ago
Yah, just had this experience with amazon in Australia. They've decided that you can only buy things from Amazon oz, but they don't stock half the stuff. I bought an instant pot from amazon UK a year or so ago and wanted to get one for my daughter. Nope can't do that any more, sent Jeff an email, got some gobbledy gook about how the taxes have to be collected for Australia now so they can't do that overseas. Yet I used to buy from Amazon US and used an Alabama address, they seemed able to apply US state based taxes without any problem. Not only do they refuse to sell things to me but they it seems they lie about the reason. Bought it from somewhere else, Amazon is now my last choice if I can't get it anywhere else.
- JazzXP 8y ago
  They've actually turned this decision around. In a few months (not sure why it's going to take so long) us Aussies will be able to buy from Amazon US again.
  - chadcmulligan 8y ago
    not UK though
usrusr 8y ago
Some more detailed examples for that list of reasons: "you can't give us more money before a sales representative had a chance to upsell you even further, sorry they are all unavailable right now", and of course the personalized variant: "... before the sales representative who called dibs on your business had a chance to upsell you even further" (in that case you might even get deliberately stalled because the transaction volume might be more valuable in the next reporting interval, or the one after. All metrics will be gamed). A properly incentivized sales org would sooner run the company to the ground than allow themselves to get bypassed for even a single transaction.
- B1FF_PSUVM 8y ago
  > All metrics will be gamed That's about it as the modern replacement for 'gnothi seauton' on the Delphi temple ...
dullroar 8y ago
This. I have always said the #1 job of a for-profit company should be extracting money from the customers wallets, and it should be as frictionless as possible. But no - examples abound of companies that seem to hate money, as you say.
stevenhubertron 8y ago
I have been trying to pay Netlify for about a year now. Their TIN still doesn't match their invoices and we a have been unable to pay. It's totally crazy to me.
turc1656 8y ago
You're not kidding. I recently booked a Disney trip for the family and ran into issues at every single stage. First, there was a problem with the airfare not displaying the proper pricing. Then I was told that I had to remove the airfare and book that separately as that was the only way I could continue online booking. When I went to pay, there was a problem with their payment system that took 24 hours to resolve (it was on their side, to be clear, not a bank issue on my side). Then I had to get someone to fix the itinerary within my account because it was all messed up. After that, there was some issue with my account and I got mysteriously locked out for no apparent reason (no, I did not enter the wrong password). And then just today, at 7 AM I became eligible to register for FastPass events now that I was inside the 60 day window for the trip. Logged on right at 7 AM and sure enough, FastPass registrations were the only thing not working on the site. Spoke to chat support and they confirmed it was site-wide and the same thing happened the previous day. They fixed it within an hour and I was finally able to register for the events, but literally every step along the way there was an issue. I expect way more from a $170B company, especially one which families give thousands of dollars to at a time. The fact that I literally couldn't give them money for a full 24 hours and had to spend about 4 hours on the phone over two days to figure out and resolve with them is absolutely mind-blowing.
- markhopkins 8y ago
  But they got your money anyway. So why would they care?
  - turc1656 8y ago
    Very fair point, but only from one perspective. Yeah I gave them my money, but they did have to pay at least 4 hours or salary+benefits for at least one person just talking to me on the phone. That doesn't include anyone else behind the scenes who was used to help rectify the issue from the technical side. Nor does it include the cost of however many other people also encounter these issues and have to spend inordinate amounts of time on the phone with their employees. That can easily add up.
    - 8y ago

lostgame 8y ago

Ha. You know, all it takes sometimes is to make a fuss - noticed a reply from DropBox already - can only imagine someone working there who saw this on the front page of HN and was smart enough to make a very quick reaction. It’s always the strangest when you’d like to give a company more money and they go out of their way to make sure it doesn’t happen.

wolfgang42 8y ago
DropBox support had already replied to this tweet 13 minutes before it was even submitted to /new, much less reached the front page. [edited for clarity]
- lostgame 8y ago
  That's even better news! Glad to hear they seem to be very on point with support, then.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    Are they? It seems the whole thread is about them not handling things correctly on the support ticket. I'd much rather have the issue resolved than get a speedy reply on social media, which usually gets shunted into a private chat where they resume the bad support anyway.
  - joshmn 8y ago
    No it's not. It's just great marketing. There are tons of users who aren't privy enough to call attention to it on social media channels. If they're not privy enough, they just don't. My friend had all her luggage lost by Iceland Air a few summers ago. She spent a week without it. She reached her destination and had just the clothes on her back and her carry-on. She talked to everyone she could. "Have you yelled at them on Twitter yet?" "No why would I do that?" She did, and 12 hours later she had her luggage.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

dylan604 8y ago

That's ridiculous that Dropbox has never thought that someone might need an upgrade to their account before their next "open-enrollment" style system. Just off the cuff thinking would suggest applying whatever money has already been paid for the existing account, prorating it for what has been already used, and then subtract that from the fee to be collected for the upgrade. Then flip the switch in the database. Sure, it might be out-of-bounds for normal workflow. To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded, it sounds like they might have realized how dumb it would be not to take a longer look at the situation. Shows that most corps' pay less attention to the actual support requests coming in than how worried that negative PR would be for having bad support in the first place. Seems like the cart is leading the horse

ProAm 8y ago
> To the credit of which ever Dropbox person responded Glad to see it takes screaming in the streets to get reasonable customer service for a paid product
- lozaning 8y ago
  There was once a bug in the MLB TV password reset and login system. I tried for days to get them to fix the issue for me and everyone else by giving them an amazingly detailed bug report. It was like emailing a brick wall to get them to fix anything. I wound up opening a new support request that listed my username, password in plain text, and a note that I cant login, please fix it. I knew they had a policy that if you emailed support with password they'd autoreset it to one and then email that to you. So my issue got fixed, but you still prolly cant use 32 character password on their site.
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    Fun fact, MLB TV runs a ton of Oracle software. Seems that their IT dept is really good at making repeated, pitiful decisions
TazeTSchnitzel 8y ago

raphaelj 8y ago

We currently have a Dropbox Business account with 16 users. We use their API to do some data pre-processing in the cloud on some of the data when it is being pushed in the Dropbox. A few days ago we reach the monthly 25.000 API calls limit, and contacted support to upgrade our plan, as they tell us to do on their pricing page [1]. That is the response we got earlier today. --- [1] https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison

gnulinux 8y ago
Wait, I'm much more curious what are you guys gonna do now? Sure, Dropbox screwed up and they can't give you more than 25000 API calls per month this year, because their system is poorly designed and not ready. But are you capable of overcoming the issue that now you have no programmatic connection to your cloud? I'm genuinely very curious.
- coldcode 8y ago
  How can a public company not be ready to upgrade a customer?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - bostik 8y ago
    Enough mindshare in the market, combined with the fact that they've already had the liquidation event?
    - nl 8y ago
      I think you mean a liquidity event...
      - serf 8y ago
        the liquidation event comes after the notoriety for bad customer service ;)

StavrosK 8y ago

Is Dropbox significantly better than Nextcloud at this point? I switched to Nextcloud because I hated the Android app and it's been great so far. Why not just switch to that?

beart 8y ago
Advice like this is always funny to me. It's kind of like being upset about the low quality of vegetables at the super market and being asked why you don't just grow your own in your backyard. I'm sure anyone who is technology savvy could switch to Nextcloud easily enough, but that isn't the point. Dropbox was probably chosen because the money is worth the convenience.
- StavrosK 8y ago
  What convenience, though? You can pay for already-hosted Nextcloud and just install and use it.
- AC_Fan 8y ago
  Hetzner has a hosted NextCloud instance at more than competitive pricing (compared to Dropbox).
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
fencepost 8y ago
If you don't have hangups about Microsoft you can also get Onedrive - 1 TB for ~$5/month, and they even throw in Office if you want it. Files On Demand also seems to work pretty well on Windows 10 boxes and is included, I think the Dropbox equivalent is only on the business plans.

preinheimer 8y ago

Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great support, just attentive marketing. For every case that has a great resolution after coverage on twitter/facebook/hacker news/local news station there's a hundred that languished unsolved and customer screwed.

trhway 8y ago
>Remember: Companies that have great responses on social media don't have great support, just attentive marketing. On other side may be they just streamlined the operations and the social media is the [only] customer case support database. If you look at various bug/case/issue databases with issue voting, discussions, etc - they do start to look like social media. So there is some convergence here. And may be Twitter can pivot and add issues/case priority/severity, release fixed in and other fields :) Imagine Periscope allowing to observe developers fixing your issues... >For every case that has a great resolution after coverage on twitter/facebook/hacker news/local news station there's a hundred that languished unsolved and customer screwed. sounds like my BugZilla, in principle if not in actual numbers :)
- mikehollinger 8y ago
  If you want to see the exact WRONG way to do this, check out Straight Talk Wireless. [1] Instead of posting an actual answer, their response throughout their forum is thousands of identical "check your direct message" replies. Someone's likely getting judged on response times, not quality of response. I gave Straight Talk a try a few years ago. It was great, until it wasn't great, and I needed some help with my voicemail. I eventually gave up, and when I went back to a "major" carrier I took pleasure in trashing the Straight Talk sim card. [1] https://www.straighttalkwirelessforum.com/search.php?keywords=%22To+further+assist+you%2C+please+check%22 https://www.straighttalkwirelessforum.com/search.php?keyword...
  - trhway 8y ago
    >Instead of posting an actual answer, their response throughout their forum is thousands of identical "check your direct message" replies. Someone's likely getting judged on response times, not quality of response. reminded how back at Sun bunch of years ago we had "forum activity (number of posts)" as a performance review metric. They should have used the number of cobras instead - at least Sun would have made some money of the cobras skins and meat :)

acjohnson55 8y ago

My biggest Dropbox frustration is that it's impossible to simply buy more space on a personal account. I suspect it's because most paying people don't come close to using 1TB, but someone who buys 2TB is certainly going to use more than 50% of it. Still, it's damn frustrating that it's not an option at all.

jl6 8y ago
They now have a 2TB plan. It costs twice as much. Ironically, this is exactly what I asked for, but that was 3 years ago and since they couldn’t do it back then, I made other arrangements, and now that it’s finally available I don’t need it.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Good to know! This didn't exist last I checked.

amelius 8y ago

Unfortunately moving your data out of Dropbox also takes 11 months ...

chmod775 8y ago

Did anyone else notice how much better the mobile twitter version is even when using it on a desktop? Browsing it is so much faster and responsive.

londons_explore 8y ago
Yes... But it still takes 7 seconds to load!

ldarby 8y ago

This is symptomatic of hiring people to do tech support whose only ability is to follow a script. Usually they can't even understand an if statement in the script. They lack the basic ability to think. I work in tech support myself (L3) and am constantly shocked at the brain-dead, useless and actively unhelpful things the lower level staff say to customers.

quantumsequoia 8y ago

I can't reccomend Box enough for businesses. It's an enterprise facing alternative to Dropbox. It has a lot more features companies will find useful Dropbox is first and foremost a consumer company