11 ms·

Dropbox for Teams

120 points by tilt 15y ago

jcampbell1 15y ago
How does dropbox handle the case were shared space is much bigger than the free space on my harddrive?
- cytzol 15y ago
  I'm that case (my Dropbox folder would almost fill up my hard drive, oh the joys of solid-state drives). You can either: a) use Selective Sync to only synchronise a few folders onto your computer, such as syncing the important documents folder but leaving the gigabytes of videos folder, or b) have Dropbox throw an error at you and stop downloading files when it runs out of room.
rufibarbatus 15y ago
Single plan at $795/year? Yikes. Dropbox is the absolutely easiest cloud storage service out there, that's certain, and I'm sure many people will find this a fair package with a fair price. But I suspect most teams of up to 5 people will find this price way above the opportunity cost of setting up and getting used to a different cloud storage service. It bears repeating: I'm not saying it's a bad package, and it would be foolish of me to assume that the market will perceive this price the way I did. But I do think they should have started offering something simpler and cheaper, and worked their way up to plans like the one they just launched.
- TomOfTTB 15y ago
  It's cheaper than their nearest competitor in the space: http://www.box.net/pricing/ http://www.box.net/pricing/
  - wildster 15y ago
    Jungledisk is much much cheaper. https://www.jungledisk.com/business/ https://www.jungledisk.com/business/
    - isnotchicago 15y ago
      200GB x 5 users (what Dropbox gives you) would cost $1950 per year on Jungledisk ($4 + 190gb*$0.15 per user). In practice, Jungledisk could be much cheaper since you only pay for what you use on Jungledisk. But you would have to do the math for your teams expected usage.
  - rufibarbatus 15y ago
    Google Docs offers ca. 1 GB for free, and sells storage upgrades of 20 GB at 5 USD/year. That means prices match at about 3 TB. So on the one hand, you have DropBox with unlimited storage and a limited, upgradeable number of users. On the other hand, you have Google, with limited, upgradable storage, and unlimited users. If only Google's storage was a bit more usable. (Also, I have a hunch an AWS-based solution may be cheaper depending on some other variables.) Like I said, the problem is not so much the package and price as it's the fact that it's the only package they're offering right now. I see very few use cases in practice for unlimited storage and limited users. EDIT: s/unlimited storage/200 GB per user/ where applicable
- ajross 15y ago
  I'm part of a small team using Dropbox right now and yeah, this was a killer. We're living inside the 2G free limit at the moment, waiting vaguely on expense approval. It's not even the amount, it's that it lives right between the "just do it" level (e.g. $30/mo on someone's credit card for EC2 hosting) and "management-visible priority" ($4k for development boards). It's simultaneously too much for me to do on a whim and not enough for my superiors to care. Drop it to $35 and bill it monthly and we'd buy it in an instant.
- kcurtin 15y ago
  I wonder if making it monthly instead of yearly would reduce some of that sticker shot. Also, it would probably be easier for small teams to signup because they wouldn't have to scrape together as much cash up front.
- mechanical_fish 15y ago
  Don't think of it as $795/year. Think of it as $13.25 per user per month. And it comes with 200GB per user and the unlimited version history feature turned on, so this is actually cheaper than five 100GB personal pro accounts ($19.99 per user per month) and it comes with twice the storage and the Teams features! A bargain! The only remaining question is why Dropbox presents the data as they do. Perhaps they did some A/B testing? My hypothesis would be that individuals and companies simply think of prices in different units. I predict that the discussion here on HN will bear this out: Someone will complain about $795/year but be happy to pay $13.25 per month. ;)
  - nobody314 15y ago
    So what's the difference in me just buying a single 50Gb $99/year account with a shared team@whatever email address and have all the team login to it?
    - mikeklaas 15y ago
      950GB, for starters
      - BrandonM 15y ago
        This is inaccurate, isn't it? The whole point of working in teams is to share files. Any file that is being shared with everyone is being counted against everyone's space. At least that's my understanding of how Dropbox works based on sharing a few folders with friends on free accounts.
        nobody314 15y ago
        Yes we initially did that, bought a 50gb account and shared that folder with everyone, but it counts against their free 2Gb shares - so everyone needs their own 50Gb plan
    - T-hawk 15y ago
      One limitation of non-team accounts is that you can't easily run multiple accounts on one machine. (It's possible with some hackery involving multiple OS user accounts.) I would hope that Dropbox for Teams makes it easy to run the team account in parallel with a personal Dropbox account.
staunch 15y ago
1. Having a monthly $75/mo plan would sure may it easier to stomach. 2. The pricing page is confusing, it looks as if there are two Dropbox for Teams plans, but really they're just comparing it to standard Dropbox.
- twakefield 15y ago
  I completely agree with point 2. It took me a while to figure out this was a comparison.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
gcv 15y ago
One of Dropbox's biggest disadvantages for "teams" is the way it handles transitive sharing. If I share "Folder A" with Alice, then she can re-share it with Bob without my permission. I can see that she has done this through the web UI, but I'd have to explicitly look at the list of users with access to the shared folder. Reading the "Dropbox for Teams" FAQ, I don't see if this problem has been fixed. It seems pretty essential for a lot of "team" functionality.
- kristaps 15y ago
  Should teams have secrets among themselves?
  - gcv 15y ago
    Suppose I'm on a team with Alice, and I share a folder with her. Bob is not on our team. Alice can share one of my folders with Bob without my consent. This is a problem (consider dealing with temporary employees, contractors, and so on). In addition, some teams really need separation of knowledge. Perhaps I have some financial or contract files which most of my employees should not read, but I want to share them with my accountant and my lawyer. This feature reeks of "enterpriseyness", so I understand that Dropbox probably doesn't want to deal with it, but it is valuable to small businesses as well.
    - joesb 15y ago
      If Alice wants to, she can always copy the file out of the team's dropbox folder and email it to Bob.
      - deleted 15y ago
        [deleted]
      - guan 15y ago
        … or copy it to her personal Dropbox, then share that folder with Bob. It would probably be superfast because of Dropbox’s deduplication.
sunchild 15y ago
Multi-user dropbox sharing needs file-level access control. Otherwise, any user in a share can delete or change shared data. Has Dropbox solved this yet?
- cytzol 15y ago
  No, and I don't think they ever will - they took long enough to implement Selective Sync. They'd rather have a product that can be seen as 'simple', than one that could have users ask "why can't this person see my files?".
  - gcv 15y ago
    Good point, and I think Dropbox can remain simple by default. It could then support an additional "advanced sharing" feature. This would allow exactly two extra flags per shared folder, per user: (1) share read-only, and (2) share non-transitively. This should allow sufficient granularity for most access-control use cases out there. Anyone who doesn't understand what this means wouldn't use the "advanced" sharing features, and many more small businesses would be able to start using the product.
- JonWood 15y ago
  I'm curious what sort of situation you have where you trust a user enough to have a copy of a particular directory tree, with the ability to copy it elsewhere and edit it, but you're concerned about them being able to make changes to it.
  - Duff 15y ago
    Huh? Have you ever worked on a shared document before? To an end-user, the directory tree is a system of record. Many types of files need to "freeze" at a certain point in time -- say a letter that needs to be crafted by multiple people, or a budget worksheet. In the case of the budget sheet, I don't mind if you copy the file and change some numbers to figure things out -- you're on the Team, after all. But I may mind if you decide to modify a file after we have a consensus that it is "done".
  - 15y ago
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Unrelated, but related: Wow, seems like half of the DB team hails from MIT.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
rednaught 15y ago
"Trusted and Dependable" and "Bank grade AES-256 bit encryption" Does that mean client-side encryption yet? Businesses are expected to use this without it? Any comments from Dropbox staff here?
- namityadav 15y ago
  It doesnt. And this has been a deal-killer for me for a long time. They'll just tell you that you can use TrueCrypt if you want client-side encryption.
- sunchild 15y ago
  Lack of client-side encryption and access control means this Teams offering is DOA, in my view.
kdkirsch 15y ago
A) I am a huge Dropbox fan (I stopped by to see their office when I was in sf a few months ago). B) the price for teams does seem a bit steep for many small businesses certainly businesses that only have 5 users. C) This is old news. Nothing new to see. Why was it posted?
- kdkirsch 15y ago
  Sorry, it wasn't clear to me from this link that it was moving out of beta to open. And the pricing now seems generous (1 TB to start). I wonder how long they can sustain that price. I'm worried that they might be biting off more they can chew with the unlimited offer. In beta, wasn't it 350 GB?
  - JoshTriplett 15y ago
    200 GB per new user, at $125/year per user, works out to $0.052/GB/month. Amazon S3, which Dropbox uses, charges $0.037/GB/month at scale. And that assumes that people use 100% of the storage they pay for, while most people don't actually run anywhere near capacity all the time. That also ignores compression and de-duplication.
lien 15y ago
Do you guys have APIs? I provide consulting at a semiconductor company and I am currently looking into helping them drive product requirements for selling subscription-based software online (optimized for their hardware). Most hardware companies don't know software and most software companies don't understand hardware. I am interested in finding out whether we could develop something together out of this...
- drewda 15y ago
  Have a look at https://www.dropbox.com/developers https://www.dropbox.com/developers
joelhaasnoot 15y ago
Don't wanna be the devil's advocate, but wasn't this around? I remember seeing this back in February, or a business offering very like it (can't remember if it was branded "for teams"). What am I missing?
- mbrubeck 15y ago
  It just came out of beta testing. Here's the discussion from the beta announcement almost a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986675 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986675
esutton 15y ago
there should be a variable option where you can trade users for storage. i.e. i want 10 users sharing 500gb, or 20 users sharing 250 gb. Dropbox for teams never attracted me not because of the storage size, rather it was the high price to add users.
bane 15y ago
How does this work if I also have a personal account?
yalogin 15y ago
I am probably being ignorant but why is sharing files among a team such a big thing? I understand the consumer side of things but the enterprise should already have at least one server and every desktop OS out there has support for NFS or some such variant. Why do I need dropbox?
- nedwin 15y ago
  Half of our team work remotely but even in the office we use DropBox because it means we can use the one platform to share internally amongst local + remote team members AND to clients. It's super easy to setup and you don't need to be technically minded to use it. Everyone understands the folder concept.

Dropbox for Teams

120 points by tilt 15y ago

jcampbell1 15y ago

How does dropbox handle the case were shared space is much bigger than the free space on my harddrive?

cytzol 15y ago
I'm that case (my Dropbox folder would almost fill up my hard drive, oh the joys of solid-state drives). You can either: a) use Selective Sync to only synchronise a few folders onto your computer, such as syncing the important documents folder but leaving the gigabytes of videos folder, or b) have Dropbox throw an error at you and stop downloading files when it runs out of room.

rufibarbatus 15y ago

Single plan at $795/year? Yikes. Dropbox is the absolutely easiest cloud storage service out there, that's certain, and I'm sure many people will find this a fair package with a fair price. But I suspect most teams of up to 5 people will find this price way above the opportunity cost of setting up and getting used to a different cloud storage service. It bears repeating: I'm not saying it's a bad package, and it would be foolish of me to assume that the market will perceive this price the way I did. But I do think they should have started offering something simpler and cheaper, and worked their way up to plans like the one they just launched.

TomOfTTB 15y ago
It's cheaper than their nearest competitor in the space: http://www.box.net/pricing/ http://www.box.net/pricing/
- wildster 15y ago
  Jungledisk is much much cheaper. https://www.jungledisk.com/business/ https://www.jungledisk.com/business/
  - isnotchicago 15y ago
    200GB x 5 users (what Dropbox gives you) would cost $1950 per year on Jungledisk ($4 + 190gb*$0.15 per user). In practice, Jungledisk could be much cheaper since you only pay for what you use on Jungledisk. But you would have to do the math for your teams expected usage.
- rufibarbatus 15y ago
  Google Docs offers ca. 1 GB for free, and sells storage upgrades of 20 GB at 5 USD/year. That means prices match at about 3 TB. So on the one hand, you have DropBox with unlimited storage and a limited, upgradeable number of users. On the other hand, you have Google, with limited, upgradable storage, and unlimited users. If only Google's storage was a bit more usable. (Also, I have a hunch an AWS-based solution may be cheaper depending on some other variables.) Like I said, the problem is not so much the package and price as it's the fact that it's the only package they're offering right now. I see very few use cases in practice for unlimited storage and limited users. EDIT: s/unlimited storage/200 GB per user/ where applicable
ajross 15y ago
I'm part of a small team using Dropbox right now and yeah, this was a killer. We're living inside the 2G free limit at the moment, waiting vaguely on expense approval. It's not even the amount, it's that it lives right between the "just do it" level (e.g. $30/mo on someone's credit card for EC2 hosting) and "management-visible priority" ($4k for development boards). It's simultaneously too much for me to do on a whim and not enough for my superiors to care. Drop it to $35 and bill it monthly and we'd buy it in an instant.
kcurtin 15y ago
I wonder if making it monthly instead of yearly would reduce some of that sticker shot. Also, it would probably be easier for small teams to signup because they wouldn't have to scrape together as much cash up front.
mechanical_fish 15y ago
Don't think of it as $795/year. Think of it as $13.25 per user per month. And it comes with 200GB per user and the unlimited version history feature turned on, so this is actually cheaper than five 100GB personal pro accounts ($19.99 per user per month) and it comes with twice the storage and the Teams features! A bargain! The only remaining question is why Dropbox presents the data as they do. Perhaps they did some A/B testing? My hypothesis would be that individuals and companies simply think of prices in different units. I predict that the discussion here on HN will bear this out: Someone will complain about $795/year but be happy to pay $13.25 per month. ;)
- nobody314 15y ago
  So what's the difference in me just buying a single 50Gb $99/year account with a shared team@whatever email address and have all the team login to it?
  - mikeklaas 15y ago
    950GB, for starters
    - BrandonM 15y ago
      This is inaccurate, isn't it? The whole point of working in teams is to share files. Any file that is being shared with everyone is being counted against everyone's space. At least that's my understanding of how Dropbox works based on sharing a few folders with friends on free accounts.
      - nobody314 15y ago
        Yes we initially did that, bought a 50gb account and shared that folder with everyone, but it counts against their free 2Gb shares - so everyone needs their own 50Gb plan
  - T-hawk 15y ago
    One limitation of non-team accounts is that you can't easily run multiple accounts on one machine. (It's possible with some hackery involving multiple OS user accounts.) I would hope that Dropbox for Teams makes it easy to run the team account in parallel with a personal Dropbox account.

staunch 15y ago

1. Having a monthly $75/mo plan would sure may it easier to stomach. 2. The pricing page is confusing, it looks as if there are two Dropbox for Teams plans, but really they're just comparing it to standard Dropbox.

twakefield 15y ago
I completely agree with point 2. It took me a while to figure out this was a comparison.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

gcv 15y ago

One of Dropbox's biggest disadvantages for "teams" is the way it handles transitive sharing. If I share "Folder A" with Alice, then she can re-share it with Bob without my permission. I can see that she has done this through the web UI, but I'd have to explicitly look at the list of users with access to the shared folder. Reading the "Dropbox for Teams" FAQ, I don't see if this problem has been fixed. It seems pretty essential for a lot of "team" functionality.

kristaps 15y ago
Should teams have secrets among themselves?
- gcv 15y ago
  Suppose I'm on a team with Alice, and I share a folder with her. Bob is not on our team. Alice can share one of my folders with Bob without my consent. This is a problem (consider dealing with temporary employees, contractors, and so on). In addition, some teams really need separation of knowledge. Perhaps I have some financial or contract files which most of my employees should not read, but I want to share them with my accountant and my lawyer. This feature reeks of "enterpriseyness", so I understand that Dropbox probably doesn't want to deal with it, but it is valuable to small businesses as well.
  - joesb 15y ago
    If Alice wants to, she can always copy the file out of the team's dropbox folder and email it to Bob.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - guan 15y ago
      … or copy it to her personal Dropbox, then share that folder with Bob. It would probably be superfast because of Dropbox’s deduplication.

sunchild 15y ago

Multi-user dropbox sharing needs file-level access control. Otherwise, any user in a share can delete or change shared data. Has Dropbox solved this yet?

cytzol 15y ago
No, and I don't think they ever will - they took long enough to implement Selective Sync. They'd rather have a product that can be seen as 'simple', than one that could have users ask "why can't this person see my files?".
- gcv 15y ago
  Good point, and I think Dropbox can remain simple by default. It could then support an additional "advanced sharing" feature. This would allow exactly two extra flags per shared folder, per user: (1) share read-only, and (2) share non-transitively. This should allow sufficient granularity for most access-control use cases out there. Anyone who doesn't understand what this means wouldn't use the "advanced" sharing features, and many more small businesses would be able to start using the product.
JonWood 15y ago
I'm curious what sort of situation you have where you trust a user enough to have a copy of a particular directory tree, with the ability to copy it elsewhere and edit it, but you're concerned about them being able to make changes to it.
- Duff 15y ago
  Huh? Have you ever worked on a shared document before? To an end-user, the directory tree is a system of record. Many types of files need to "freeze" at a certain point in time -- say a letter that needs to be crafted by multiple people, or a budget worksheet. In the case of the budget sheet, I don't mind if you copy the file and change some numbers to figure things out -- you're on the Team, after all. But I may mind if you decide to modify a file after we have a consensus that it is "done".
- 15y ago

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Unrelated, but related: Wow, seems like half of the DB team hails from MIT.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

rednaught 15y ago

"Trusted and Dependable" and "Bank grade AES-256 bit encryption" Does that mean client-side encryption yet? Businesses are expected to use this without it? Any comments from Dropbox staff here?

namityadav 15y ago
It doesnt. And this has been a deal-killer for me for a long time. They'll just tell you that you can use TrueCrypt if you want client-side encryption.
sunchild 15y ago
Lack of client-side encryption and access control means this Teams offering is DOA, in my view.

kdkirsch 15y ago

A) I am a huge Dropbox fan (I stopped by to see their office when I was in sf a few months ago). B) the price for teams does seem a bit steep for many small businesses certainly businesses that only have 5 users. C) This is old news. Nothing new to see. Why was it posted?

kdkirsch 15y ago
Sorry, it wasn't clear to me from this link that it was moving out of beta to open. And the pricing now seems generous (1 TB to start). I wonder how long they can sustain that price. I'm worried that they might be biting off more they can chew with the unlimited offer. In beta, wasn't it 350 GB?
- JoshTriplett 15y ago
  200 GB per new user, at $125/year per user, works out to $0.052/GB/month. Amazon S3, which Dropbox uses, charges $0.037/GB/month at scale. And that assumes that people use 100% of the storage they pay for, while most people don't actually run anywhere near capacity all the time. That also ignores compression and de-duplication.

lien 15y ago

Do you guys have APIs? I provide consulting at a semiconductor company and I am currently looking into helping them drive product requirements for selling subscription-based software online (optimized for their hardware). Most hardware companies don't know software and most software companies don't understand hardware. I am interested in finding out whether we could develop something together out of this...

drewda 15y ago
Have a look at https://www.dropbox.com/developers https://www.dropbox.com/developers

joelhaasnoot 15y ago

Don't wanna be the devil's advocate, but wasn't this around? I remember seeing this back in February, or a business offering very like it (can't remember if it was branded "for teams"). What am I missing?

mbrubeck 15y ago
It just came out of beta testing. Here's the discussion from the beta announcement almost a year ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986675 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1986675

esutton 15y ago

there should be a variable option where you can trade users for storage. i.e. i want 10 users sharing 500gb, or 20 users sharing 250 gb. Dropbox for teams never attracted me not because of the storage size, rather it was the high price to add users.

bane 15y ago

How does this work if I also have a personal account?

yalogin 15y ago

I am probably being ignorant but why is sharing files among a team such a big thing? I understand the consumer side of things but the enterprise should already have at least one server and every desktop OS out there has support for NFS or some such variant. Why do I need dropbox?

nedwin 15y ago
Half of our team work remotely but even in the office we use DropBox because it means we can use the one platform to share internally amongst local + remote team members AND to clients. It's super easy to setup and you don't need to be technically minded to use it. Everyone understands the folder concept.