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Dropbox is a brilliant piece of software however it's hard to justify more than $10/month for backup as a consumer. Since 50Gb only now covers my photos and doc

Dropbox is a brilliant piece of software however it's hard to justify more than $10/month for backup as a consumer. Since 50Gb only now covers my photos and docs, doesn't cover my music and even my photo collection's needs trimming to fit I would move to GDrive very quickly rather than double that spend to get to the next tier. I've long hoped that Dropbox would segment their pricing plans more. It's unsettling having an increasing volume of content not backed up and if GDrive really does deliver I would move to it. My loyalty is to DB and I've yet to be convinced on GDrive's usability but it doesn't make sense to pay an extra $100/year as a loyalty fee.

esutton 15y ago
in the dropbox forums company representatives constantly comment that lower price plans are not feasible. That said, I've always been disappointed by companies that make you buy buckets of units (like postpaid cellphone plans) that they know you will never use rather than offering a per unit price. If the cost to provide 1gb of storage per month is higher than 10/50, than charge the higher price, don't hide it by shifting the cost of power users onto regular users.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I do believe them that lower prices are not feasible while they are reselling Amazon S3... this GDrive rumor might be the push Dropbox needs to bite the bullet and buy their own servers.
  - kooshball 15y ago
    They definitely need to buy their own servers at some point in the future. I do remember storage is their main cost. With the big round they just closed, I can't imagine there's not a few engineers working on that already.
- petenixey 15y ago
  The guys know better than me but with all Amazon's price reductions, 100Gb/year comes to $44.40. There are transfer costs on top of that however there are no longer transfer fees IN to S3 and I would guess that the OUT bandwidth is primarily generated by a small number of files on your machine and probably stays pretty linear past a certain point. I think those prices were the cheapest viable at the start but it feels like there are more competitive ones now (and that's assuming they're not building their own cheaper datacentres).
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Unit costs don't work at small scale. For one thing, there's no single ideal unit: In reality, it's a multidimensional space. If you charge by unit bucket size the folks who constantly churn their files may eat you alive with bandwidth charges; if you charge by unit bandwidth folks may upload great gobs of data; if you charge for both bandwidth and storage people will get mightily confused and will tend leave your product for a competitor with a more predictable pricing model. ;) Costs are also nonlinear. The most nonlinear are support costs. You may pay as much to support the user who pays $1 for your service as the user who pays $100. (Unless you keep a meter running and charge by the support-minute, which makes customers very unhappy.) And in practice it's even worse than that: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the customers who are obsessed with saving money cost more to support. And let me emphasize that costs aren't even the key issue. Engineers tend to forget this, but the price of a product need have little to do with the cost of producing it. Products should be priced based on value to a customer, and that doesn't scale linearly either. The first few hundred MB of Dropbox are the most precious of all, partly because that's enough to sync my most critical and frequently-changing files, and partly because it includes the installation and setup overhead (and, probably, most of the support costs). Then the next few GB is somewhat less precious. By the time we reach a 49GB plan, the value-per-GB is significantly lower. I don't have 60GB of important stuff. Moreover, Dropbox is significantly less convenient when shlepping around huge amounts of data, because it's not magical: It takes time to sync all that stuff over my lame-O cable connection.
- timwiseman 15y ago
  He's in a position to know, and I am not, but this surprises me. Personally, I hesitate at $10 a month when I am currently using less than the 2GB of free space available. If there were a $5/month plan that was even minutely better than the free offering, I would sign up without a second thought. I suspect I am far from the only one in that position.
wladimir 15y ago
It is not "simply backup". They provide a user friendly synchronization service for files between all your devices. Sure, for simply stashing files there are much cheaper options such as Amazon S3 or simply a friend's linux box in his basement... but it is not entirely a fair comparison.
- bradleyland 15y ago
  "They provide a user friendly synchronization service for files between all your devices." .... And users! For a small company who has a geographically dispersed user population, Dropbox is a great tool. The key is the dead simple setup and operation. 1) Install software 2) Use tool Sharing folders is about three clicks from logging in to the website, and you can get there directly through shell (Explorer, Finder) integration in both PC and Mac.
  - jorangreef 15y ago
    I take it you already have the "install software" and "use tool" steps out of the way, would you be interested in a web-based file-system, with tagging organization, as opposed to folder organization?
    - ori_b 15y ago
      No. I just want a folder that syncs.
    - bradleyland 15y ago
      Not particularly. My users don't understand it. Google Apps has been fighting this for some time in both Gmail and Google Docs. Users are used to folders, but Google uses tags and collections. They used to call collections (Google Docs) folders, but the fact that a document could exist in two 'folders' confused the hell out of my users. As it turns out, the benefits of a tagging based approach don't pay out nearly as much as the user training and maintenance costs.
  - brlewis 15y ago
    That's (Explorer, Finder, Nautilus) in (Windows, Mac, Linux)
pchristensen 15y ago
For most people the barrier isn't cost, it's grasping the value of having backups in the first place. If using GDrive is even .000000000000001% harder than "save files in a folder", Dropbox has nothing to worry about.
keltex 15y ago
I agree. I love DropBox (and happily pay the $100/yr fee), but at 50GB isn't not enough for my photos & music. They are going to need to be at least in the ballpark of Google's pricing. If Google was $50/yr for 50GB I wouldn't switch. But if they are $20/yr for 50GB then I would seriously consider it.

esutton 15y ago

in the dropbox forums company representatives constantly comment that lower price plans are not feasible. That said, I've always been disappointed by companies that make you buy buckets of units (like postpaid cellphone plans) that they know you will never use rather than offering a per unit price. If the cost to provide 1gb of storage per month is higher than 10/50, than charge the higher price, don't hide it by shifting the cost of power users onto regular users.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago
I do believe them that lower prices are not feasible while they are reselling Amazon S3... this GDrive rumor might be the push Dropbox needs to bite the bullet and buy their own servers.
- kooshball 15y ago
  They definitely need to buy their own servers at some point in the future. I do remember storage is their main cost. With the big round they just closed, I can't imagine there's not a few engineers working on that already.
petenixey 15y ago
The guys know better than me but with all Amazon's price reductions, 100Gb/year comes to $44.40. There are transfer costs on top of that however there are no longer transfer fees IN to S3 and I would guess that the OUT bandwidth is primarily generated by a small number of files on your machine and probably stays pretty linear past a certain point. I think those prices were the cheapest viable at the start but it feels like there are more competitive ones now (and that's assuming they're not building their own cheaper datacentres).
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Unit costs don't work at small scale. For one thing, there's no single ideal unit: In reality, it's a multidimensional space. If you charge by unit bucket size the folks who constantly churn their files may eat you alive with bandwidth charges; if you charge by unit bandwidth folks may upload great gobs of data; if you charge for both bandwidth and storage people will get mightily confused and will tend leave your product for a competitor with a more predictable pricing model. ;) Costs are also nonlinear. The most nonlinear are support costs. You may pay as much to support the user who pays $1 for your service as the user who pays $100. (Unless you keep a meter running and charge by the support-minute, which makes customers very unhappy.) And in practice it's even worse than that: Anecdotal evidence suggests that the customers who are obsessed with saving money cost more to support. And let me emphasize that costs aren't even the key issue. Engineers tend to forget this, but the price of a product need have little to do with the cost of producing it. Products should be priced based on value to a customer, and that doesn't scale linearly either. The first few hundred MB of Dropbox are the most precious of all, partly because that's enough to sync my most critical and frequently-changing files, and partly because it includes the installation and setup overhead (and, probably, most of the support costs). Then the next few GB is somewhat less precious. By the time we reach a 49GB plan, the value-per-GB is significantly lower. I don't have 60GB of important stuff. Moreover, Dropbox is significantly less convenient when shlepping around huge amounts of data, because it's not magical: It takes time to sync all that stuff over my lame-O cable connection.
timwiseman 15y ago
He's in a position to know, and I am not, but this surprises me. Personally, I hesitate at $10 a month when I am currently using less than the 2GB of free space available. If there were a $5/month plan that was even minutely better than the free offering, I would sign up without a second thought. I suspect I am far from the only one in that position.

wladimir 15y ago

It is not "simply backup". They provide a user friendly synchronization service for files between all your devices. Sure, for simply stashing files there are much cheaper options such as Amazon S3 or simply a friend's linux box in his basement... but it is not entirely a fair comparison.

bradleyland 15y ago
"They provide a user friendly synchronization service for files between all your devices." .... And users! For a small company who has a geographically dispersed user population, Dropbox is a great tool. The key is the dead simple setup and operation. 1) Install software 2) Use tool Sharing folders is about three clicks from logging in to the website, and you can get there directly through shell (Explorer, Finder) integration in both PC and Mac.
- jorangreef 15y ago
  I take it you already have the "install software" and "use tool" steps out of the way, would you be interested in a web-based file-system, with tagging organization, as opposed to folder organization?
  - ori_b 15y ago
    No. I just want a folder that syncs.
  - bradleyland 15y ago
    Not particularly. My users don't understand it. Google Apps has been fighting this for some time in both Gmail and Google Docs. Users are used to folders, but Google uses tags and collections. They used to call collections (Google Docs) folders, but the fact that a document could exist in two 'folders' confused the hell out of my users. As it turns out, the benefits of a tagging based approach don't pay out nearly as much as the user training and maintenance costs.
- brlewis 15y ago
  That's (Explorer, Finder, Nautilus) in (Windows, Mac, Linux)

pchristensen 15y ago

For most people the barrier isn't cost, it's grasping the value of having backups in the first place. If using GDrive is even .000000000000001% harder than "save files in a folder", Dropbox has nothing to worry about.

keltex 15y ago

I agree. I love DropBox (and happily pay the $100/yr fee), but at 50GB isn't not enough for my photos & music. They are going to need to be at least in the ballpark of Google's pricing. If Google was $50/yr for 50GB I wouldn't switch. But if they are $20/yr for 50GB then I would seriously consider it.