6 ms·

I wish dropbox had fewer features not more. Peak dropbox was like 5 years ago

by boromi 6y ago

ffpip 6y ago
Yeah. It's too expensive now. G Suite is $12 USD / user / month. It gives you unlimited storage. AND everything else like Meet, Forms, Docs, Slides, Mail, Sheets, Apps Script, etc. Dropbox is $15 / user / month. For 5 TB. How does that even make sense? The features are also lacking. SSL is apparently a feature now.
- somehnguy 6y ago
  G Suite is an incredible value. I have an account with a single user, paying $12+tax/month. On that account I have 20TB in Drive. Good luck getting that kind of storage pricing elsewhere, I'm actually nervous about Google ever deciding to kill the heaviest users or charge more because I don't know where else I would go. In my understanding my 20TB isn't just 20TB sitting in their datacenter, it's de-duped across accounts. But still, amazing value.
  - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
    Isn't it <= 1TB if less than 5 users ?
    - somehnguy 6y ago
      Technically, yes. But it has never been enforced AFAIK. That could change tomorrow of course, so I would be cautious of using it for anything that is very important.
      - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
        Ho! Very interesting. I always thought it was very much an active thing.
      - MiroF 6y ago
        I suspect that posting about this on HN is one of the fastest routes towards getting this fixed, in terms of concentration of Google engineers likely to see your post.
        somehnguy 6y ago
        Ha, that would be super unfortunate. But not too worried about that happening. It's been openly talked about online for years with no action.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    In my thought, anyway Google must hold data to support eDiscovery, so they remove capacity limit.
- myth_drannon 6y ago
  GSuite tech support is non-existent. I always had a prompt support from Dropbox
  - mav3rick 6y ago
    It's not. They are very prompt
- _gtly 6y ago
  Synching with GDrive for me has been painfully slow. I thought it would be a drop-in replacement for Dropbox, but deleting files in particular seemed to take forever. Probably just some growing pains, but I've never experienced that with Dropbox. EDIT Also I had an issue with my mac pinwheeling google's 'Backup and Sync' agent. It's fixed now after a couple months, but there was nowhere I could find to report the problem to Google.
  - gyom 6y ago
    I have also had bad experiences with "Backup and Sync", which led me to abandon Google Drive right when I was seriously considering ditching Dropbox. Given Google's reputation to ditch their own products, I guessed this was some side projects that some Googlers did, and it was never in Google's main strategy to allow people to sync their Google Drive to their local machines. Quite the opposite, actually. My current gripe with Dropbox is that I'd like to basically be able to pay 4x the "Dropbox Plus" cost in order to get 4x the storage (without having to manage 4 separate accounts). Having 2TB isn't enough, but having "infinite" with Dropbox Business certainly is more than I want.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  No way I'd ever depend on Google for more than mail which I can reasonably back up. Not with the only meaningful way to get support from a live human is either knowing employees personally who can raise issues internally, involving the media or raise a shitstorm on Twitter/HN, and at the same time them having "AI" blackbox algorithms close down accounts with no recourse.
- wenc 6y ago
  I used the free tier of Dropbox for 8 years and decided to subscribe recently. $10/user/month [1] for Dropbox Plus. 2TB storage (more than enough for most people who aren't doing video-editing or have a video library -- I barely fill up my 250GB SSD as it is), a client that works well on Linux (and have for years), and not Google. I'd say I'm getting my money's worth. I'm not really that tempted to use Google Drive. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/buy?_tk=individual_hero_button https://www.dropbox.com/buy?_tk=individual_hero_button
azhenley 6y ago
There is one major feature I wish it had... version comparison. I wrote about it a little bit ago: "Hey Dropbox, why can't I compare file versions like this?" https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/whycanticomparefileversions.html https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/whycanticomparefileversio... I do also wish it didn't lock up my entire computer whenever I make a big change to Selective Sync. I talked to a Dropbox PM after my blog post got some traction and he seemed surprised that this is still an issue.
- mattgerstman 6y ago
  I'm not totally informed on this subject, but I do know our sync team is hiring :)
- necrotic_comp 6y ago
  I remember this post. It would definitely be a great feature.
- MatDef 6y ago
  As someone who's asked for that feature for 5+ years now from everyone I've met there, it doesn't seem like there's much interest internally at Dropbox to implement it. I know it can't be easy to do, but it's such a killer feature IMO that would totally revolutionize workflows.
  - azhenley 6y ago
    I have wanted to build it, but a standalone tool (outside of Dropbox or another sync tool) would be really hard to integrate into workflows, I think.
    - MatDef 6y ago
      Agreed. A long time ago, Perforce released a tool that they called Commons, it used OpenOffice under the covers to diff Office documents and display everything in a fairly easy to understand webUI. It wasn't perfect, but treating "documents as code" would scratch that itch that I've had with Dropbox since I've used it. Just something I've learned to live without, at least for the foreseeable future.
techsupporter 6y ago
"While we started as a storage company, we‘ve grown to be a hub to manage your digital life." I guess there's just no money in "very easy, super reliable, many device file sync."
- Swizec 6y ago
  Plenty of money in that. Look at how many startups and large tech cos are solving this problem under different skins. Everything from Notion to iCloud to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem. Imagine if you were the Stripe of multi-device sync. Sure maybe end users will never know your name but damn you’d be drowning in money. Like imagine adding multidevice sync to your product with a simple library instead of everyone cobbling it from scratch and hiring huge teams to make it reliable.
  - mattgerstman 6y ago
    It's important to note that many of these companies are operating under different constraints than us. Bigger companies are able to reduce the price of storage based on it's value to other features. Some companies make storage cheaper by going through your data and/or selling it, this goes against our values and we won't do it.
  - twic 6y ago
    That sounds like Firebase. Or what Firebase was once going to be.
  - cure 6y ago
    > to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem. Funny you give this as an example, that feature is completely unreliable for me. Netflix frequently forgets where I left off, and in the case of TV shows, which episodes I really did see all the way to the end, and which I didn't. Similarly on Prime Video, it's quite unreliable.
    - Swizec 6y ago
mStreamTeam 6y ago
I moved from Dropbox to SyncThing because of the feature creep
abathur 6y ago
I think Dropbox Paper is pretty nice, and it's only really been a fully-formed thing for a few years. :) Caveat: I don't use any Dropbox desktop apps, and I think Paper is the only mobile app I use, so I may not notice/suffer feature creep the same way.
- mattgerstman 6y ago
  Thanks, we love paper too!
toomim 6y ago
Steve Jobs famously said "Dropbox is a feature; not a product." Now Dropbox has become a product and we don't like it.
- pkaye 6y ago
  Maybe those who now complain about it becoming a product didn't agree with Steve Jobs.
- thinkharderdev 6y ago
  I always found it somewhat amusing that people used to point to that quote by Jobs as a knock on him for being wrong. Lately it seems like he may have been right all along.
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    Or he has been wrong for a long time before others added that feature to their product.
    - thinkharderdev 6y ago
      I take the original comment to be that file syncing will never be a product on it's own. The market for people who need file syncing on its own is small and it only really becomes useful for a large number of paying customers when it is something embedded into a more directly useful product (like GSuite or Office 365). And I think he's been largely right. It's common on HN for people to complain about how Dropbox was great when it did just one thing really well but they weren't a profitable company doing one thing really well. They always needed to create a broader product on top of file syncing in order to survive as a standalone business.
      - johnchristopher 6y ago
        Well, I was under the impression/illusion that Dropbox was profitable long before that but it looks like https://www.engadget.com/dropbox-records-first-profit-ever-135846388.html https://www.engadget.com/dropbox-records-first-profit-ever-1... I was wrong. > While many companies struggle through the pandemic, Dropbox seems to be doing well. In its first quarter, it brought in $455 million, an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year. According to Bloomberg, last quarter was the first time that Dropbox recorded net income since going public in 2018. In other words, it took a pandemic to make the company profitable.
Ericson2314 6y ago
Even when it was a nice "do one simple thing" company, that thing was a bit of a square peg. The fact is that the hierarchical file system is a silly way of structuring data that doesn't meat people's needs. I've never understood how Dropbox could be a sustainable business. All the walled gardens have legitimate UX and anti-competative / anti-interopt reasons to get away from files, and the actual core service Dropbox provides is quite commoditized.
- mattgerstman 6y ago
  Yep this is it. We need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace.
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    To be clear, I'm saying your in trouble either way: - Just storage: it's commoditization so you have your own hardware and compete at that level - Other stuff: Now you are alt GSuite. Google needs competition, not know you are fighting and N front war and your old users may not care. Now VC usually tries to avoid competing head-on with FAANG, and the current situation was definitely inevitable, so quite confused why Dropbox got funded in the first place.
    - reducesuffering 6y ago
      > so quite confused why Dropbox got funded in the first place Because they're still worth 8 billion dollars now?
nemothekid 6y ago
Even then it seems they are removing storage features. My Dad has 2 MacBook Pros - one at work and one at home. Maybe 8 years ago he was complaining about having to email himself documents so he had them available at home. I setup this nifty service - DropBox for him. One thing that got him to stick with it was I symlinked his Documents folder to DropBox. For him he didn't have to change his workflow. He would save at home, and go to work and the file would be there magically. Anytime he was on the road he could use the Dropbox UI and get anything he needed. He used less than the free 2GB of space for a long time, but was a paying customer from day one. One day, last year, he calls me exasperated that his DropBox no longer worked. I discovered they killed the feature and "controlling his digital life" wasn't all that important to him. I had moved to iCloud Drive a while back and told him to do the same. No more DropBox.
conception 6y ago
Pcloud has been pretty fantastic. Good features like encryption built in.

I wish dropbox had fewer features not more. Peak dropbox was like 5 years ago

by boromi 6y ago

I wish dropbox had fewer features not more. Peak dropbox was like 5 years ago

Yeah. It's too expensive now. G Suite is $12 USD / user / month. It gives you unlimited storage. AND everything else like Meet, Forms, Docs, Slides, Mail, Sheets, Apps Script, etc. Dropbox is $15 / user / month. For 5 TB. How does that even make sense? The features are also lacking. SSL is apparently a feature now.

somehnguy 6y ago
G Suite is an incredible value. I have an account with a single user, paying $12+tax/month. On that account I have 20TB in Drive. Good luck getting that kind of storage pricing elsewhere, I'm actually nervous about Google ever deciding to kill the heaviest users or charge more because I don't know where else I would go. In my understanding my 20TB isn't just 20TB sitting in their datacenter, it's de-duped across accounts. But still, amazing value.
- the_svd_doctor 6y ago
  Isn't it <= 1TB if less than 5 users ?
  - somehnguy 6y ago
    Technically, yes. But it has never been enforced AFAIK. That could change tomorrow of course, so I would be cautious of using it for anything that is very important.
    - the_svd_doctor 6y ago
      Ho! Very interesting. I always thought it was very much an active thing.
    - MiroF 6y ago
      I suspect that posting about this on HN is one of the fastest routes towards getting this fixed, in terms of concentration of Google engineers likely to see your post.
      - somehnguy 6y ago
        Ha, that would be super unfortunate. But not too worried about that happening. It's been openly talked about online for years with no action.
- fomine3 6y ago
  In my thought, anyway Google must hold data to support eDiscovery, so they remove capacity limit.
myth_drannon 6y ago
GSuite tech support is non-existent. I always had a prompt support from Dropbox
- mav3rick 6y ago
  It's not. They are very prompt
_gtly 6y ago
Synching with GDrive for me has been painfully slow. I thought it would be a drop-in replacement for Dropbox, but deleting files in particular seemed to take forever. Probably just some growing pains, but I've never experienced that with Dropbox. EDIT Also I had an issue with my mac pinwheeling google's 'Backup and Sync' agent. It's fixed now after a couple months, but there was nowhere I could find to report the problem to Google.
- gyom 6y ago
  I have also had bad experiences with "Backup and Sync", which led me to abandon Google Drive right when I was seriously considering ditching Dropbox. Given Google's reputation to ditch their own products, I guessed this was some side projects that some Googlers did, and it was never in Google's main strategy to allow people to sync their Google Drive to their local machines. Quite the opposite, actually. My current gripe with Dropbox is that I'd like to basically be able to pay 4x the "Dropbox Plus" cost in order to get 4x the storage (without having to manage 4 separate accounts). Having 2TB isn't enough, but having "infinite" with Dropbox Business certainly is more than I want.
mschuster91 6y ago
No way I'd ever depend on Google for more than mail which I can reasonably back up. Not with the only meaningful way to get support from a live human is either knowing employees personally who can raise issues internally, involving the media or raise a shitstorm on Twitter/HN, and at the same time them having "AI" blackbox algorithms close down accounts with no recourse.
wenc 6y ago
I used the free tier of Dropbox for 8 years and decided to subscribe recently. $10/user/month [1] for Dropbox Plus. 2TB storage (more than enough for most people who aren't doing video-editing or have a video library -- I barely fill up my 250GB SSD as it is), a client that works well on Linux (and have for years), and not Google. I'd say I'm getting my money's worth. I'm not really that tempted to use Google Drive. [1] https://www.dropbox.com/buy?_tk=individual_hero_button https://www.dropbox.com/buy?_tk=individual_hero_button

azhenley 6y ago

There is one major feature I wish it had... version comparison. I wrote about it a little bit ago: "Hey Dropbox, why can't I compare file versions like this?" https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/whycanticomparefileversions.html https://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/blog/whycanticomparefileversio... I do also wish it didn't lock up my entire computer whenever I make a big change to Selective Sync. I talked to a Dropbox PM after my blog post got some traction and he seemed surprised that this is still an issue.

mattgerstman 6y ago
I'm not totally informed on this subject, but I do know our sync team is hiring :)
necrotic_comp 6y ago
I remember this post. It would definitely be a great feature.
MatDef 6y ago
As someone who's asked for that feature for 5+ years now from everyone I've met there, it doesn't seem like there's much interest internally at Dropbox to implement it. I know it can't be easy to do, but it's such a killer feature IMO that would totally revolutionize workflows.
- azhenley 6y ago
  I have wanted to build it, but a standalone tool (outside of Dropbox or another sync tool) would be really hard to integrate into workflows, I think.
  - MatDef 6y ago
    Agreed. A long time ago, Perforce released a tool that they called Commons, it used OpenOffice under the covers to diff Office documents and display everything in a fairly easy to understand webUI. It wasn't perfect, but treating "documents as code" would scratch that itch that I've had with Dropbox since I've used it. Just something I've learned to live without, at least for the foreseeable future.

techsupporter 6y ago

"While we started as a storage company, we‘ve grown to be a hub to manage your digital life." I guess there's just no money in "very easy, super reliable, many device file sync."

Swizec 6y ago
Plenty of money in that. Look at how many startups and large tech cos are solving this problem under different skins. Everything from Notion to iCloud to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem. Imagine if you were the Stripe of multi-device sync. Sure maybe end users will never know your name but damn you’d be drowning in money. Like imagine adding multidevice sync to your product with a simple library instead of everyone cobbling it from scratch and hiring huge teams to make it reliable.
- mattgerstman 6y ago
  It's important to note that many of these companies are operating under different constraints than us. Bigger companies are able to reduce the price of storage based on it's value to other features. Some companies make storage cheaper by going through your data and/or selling it, this goes against our values and we won't do it.
- twic 6y ago
  That sounds like Firebase. Or what Firebase was once going to be.
- cure 6y ago
  > to Netflix remembering the timestamp you stopped falls under this broad umbrella problem. Funny you give this as an example, that feature is completely unreliable for me. Netflix frequently forgets where I left off, and in the case of TV shows, which episodes I really did see all the way to the end, and which I didn't. Similarly on Prime Video, it's quite unreliable.
  - Swizec 6y ago

mStreamTeam 6y ago

I moved from Dropbox to SyncThing because of the feature creep

abathur 6y ago

I think Dropbox Paper is pretty nice, and it's only really been a fully-formed thing for a few years. :) Caveat: I don't use any Dropbox desktop apps, and I think Paper is the only mobile app I use, so I may not notice/suffer feature creep the same way.

mattgerstman 6y ago
Thanks, we love paper too!

toomim 6y ago

Steve Jobs famously said "Dropbox is a feature; not a product." Now Dropbox has become a product and we don't like it.

pkaye 6y ago
Maybe those who now complain about it becoming a product didn't agree with Steve Jobs.
thinkharderdev 6y ago
I always found it somewhat amusing that people used to point to that quote by Jobs as a knock on him for being wrong. Lately it seems like he may have been right all along.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  Or he has been wrong for a long time before others added that feature to their product.
  - thinkharderdev 6y ago
    I take the original comment to be that file syncing will never be a product on it's own. The market for people who need file syncing on its own is small and it only really becomes useful for a large number of paying customers when it is something embedded into a more directly useful product (like GSuite or Office 365). And I think he's been largely right. It's common on HN for people to complain about how Dropbox was great when it did just one thing really well but they weren't a profitable company doing one thing really well. They always needed to create a broader product on top of file syncing in order to survive as a standalone business.
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      Well, I was under the impression/illusion that Dropbox was profitable long before that but it looks like https://www.engadget.com/dropbox-records-first-profit-ever-135846388.html https://www.engadget.com/dropbox-records-first-profit-ever-1... I was wrong. > While many companies struggle through the pandemic, Dropbox seems to be doing well. In its first quarter, it brought in $455 million, an increase of 18 percent compared to the same period last year. According to Bloomberg, last quarter was the first time that Dropbox recorded net income since going public in 2018. In other words, it took a pandemic to make the company profitable.

Ericson2314 6y ago

Even when it was a nice "do one simple thing" company, that thing was a bit of a square peg. The fact is that the hierarchical file system is a silly way of structuring data that doesn't meat people's needs. I've never understood how Dropbox could be a sustainable business. All the walled gardens have legitimate UX and anti-competative / anti-interopt reasons to get away from files, and the actual core service Dropbox provides is quite commoditized.

mattgerstman 6y ago
Yep this is it. We need to provide more than just storage to succeed in the marketplace.
- Ericson2314 6y ago
  To be clear, I'm saying your in trouble either way: - Just storage: it's commoditization so you have your own hardware and compete at that level - Other stuff: Now you are alt GSuite. Google needs competition, not know you are fighting and N front war and your old users may not care. Now VC usually tries to avoid competing head-on with FAANG, and the current situation was definitely inevitable, so quite confused why Dropbox got funded in the first place.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    > so quite confused why Dropbox got funded in the first place Because they're still worth 8 billion dollars now?

nemothekid 6y ago

Even then it seems they are removing storage features. My Dad has 2 MacBook Pros - one at work and one at home. Maybe 8 years ago he was complaining about having to email himself documents so he had them available at home. I setup this nifty service - DropBox for him. One thing that got him to stick with it was I symlinked his Documents folder to DropBox. For him he didn't have to change his workflow. He would save at home, and go to work and the file would be there magically. Anytime he was on the road he could use the Dropbox UI and get anything he needed. He used less than the free 2GB of space for a long time, but was a paying customer from day one. One day, last year, he calls me exasperated that his DropBox no longer worked. I discovered they killed the feature and "controlling his digital life" wasn't all that important to him. I had moved to iCloud Drive a while back and told him to do the same. No more DropBox.

conception 6y ago

Pcloud has been pretty fantastic. Good features like encryption built in.