6 ms·

Upgrading Dropbox to 16GB for 25USD

67 points by preek 15y ago

kevinherron 15y ago
Clever girl.
ben1040 15y ago
Another vote to say this works - I maxed out my Dropbox referrals for about 20 bucks a few weeks ago. This is a good way to burn those $100 AdWords credits that Google likes to hand out like candy.
- ckenst 15y ago
  Sounds like a good hack. How much did you spend and how much additional storage did you get?
  - teach 15y ago
    He wrote "for about 20 bucks", so I suspect he spent around $20. And "maxed out my Dropbox referrals" seems to imply that he did it up to the maximum for Dropbox referrals, which is 8 GB.
    - ben1040 15y ago
      You've got the first part right, but I also happen to work for a university so I associated my .edu email address to my Dropbox account. Doing that will double your referral bonus to 500MB per referral, and double your maximum free space from referrals to 16GB.
      - docgnome 15y ago
        Did that happen right away that you got more space from your .edu? i put mine it and it didn't seem to do anything.
        preek 15y ago
        For me it did happen instantly.
        docgnome 15y ago
        Huh. Did the text that says what you get change? Like from 250 to 500? Maybe I just don't know how much space I had heh.
        preek 15y ago
        The text changed from 250 to 500, also my available space doubled. I didn't even get an email to tell me, it just happened.
        docgnome 15y ago
        Oh. i was just doing it wrong. doh!
    - ckenst 15y ago
      I'm assuming it will be more than "about 20 bucks" once people find out about this! On the plus side its free money from Google right?
shizcakes 15y ago
I don't know why Dropbox STILL refuses to institute a 25GB plan. It's the most common complaint I hear. Now, people are giving their money to Google instead of Dropbox - that just totally seems backwards. I hope they have some really solid data showing that this is irrelevant.
- roc 15y ago
  I'd guess it's because the pricing doesn't work out in the aggregate. If more people would downgrade to 25GB from 50GB than would be motivated to pull out their credit-card by the inclusion of a 25GB plan, the thing would be a net loss for Dropbox. And, honestly, I can't imagine there are many people willing to pay $5/mo but unwilling to go to $10/mo. $5/mo is such a minor difference compared to the costs implicit in even having a multiple-machine sync-ing problem to solve.
  - roc 15y ago
    Thinking about it more, I wonder if Dropbox's mistake here wasn't in having too-high an initial price, but in being too-generous with the storage attached to that price. 50GB is more than most people need to sync. It feels almost wasteful to have that much unused storage on a 50GB plan. Perhaps 25GB should have been $10, 50GB $15 and 100GB $20. Paying for 25GB when you only need 15GB might not feel as wasteful as paying for 50GB when you only need 15GB. Even if the net cost is the same.
    - TillE 15y ago
      That's basically what I was going to say. If you're paying $10/month for 50GB and only using a fraction of it, it feels like you're wasting money. Even if that's objectively "good value", it doesn't really matter. It's the same basic problem subscription MMOs are facing, and why so many are going free-to-play. It's also easier to convince people to pay a bunch of small one-time fees rather than a recurring monthly or yearly fee.
  - timwiseman 15y ago
    I think your first point is brilliant, but your second I disagree with. $5/month is $60 a year, practically an impulse purchase for a lot of people. $10/month is $120/year. That psychologically adds an extra digit to both the monthly and years and that is also high enough to be outside impulse buy range. Anecdotally, I love dropbox, but I don't even fully use the 2GB free account (mostly text files). I would pay $60/year immediately for even a 5GB or 10GB plan on the possibility I might need it swiftly or to give me the freedom of tossing on some more pictures of the kids. But I can't justify $120/year when I still have space left ont he free account.
brador 15y ago
The article brings up an interesting point on the side. What do users need all that space for these days? Movies? - itunes/netflix/amazon, music? - itunes, games - steam, pics - cloud/flickr/facebook. The demand for large personal data storage (for non-pirates of course) is decreasing I say.
- krschultz 15y ago
  In my case it's pictures. Yes, some of my pictures are on Facebook and Flickr. All of them are backed up in the cloud. And I still have 3-4 different computers synced with all of them. You can download/stream music or movies, but I can never go back in time and take family pictures again. I might be overly sensitive to it because my grandparents lost all of their pictures in a storage unit fire, but I think it is a fair point. My pictures fill up approximately 40-60 GB. I have about 200 GB of other files, of which maybe 1GB is critical. If I lost the rest I wouldn't really care, so I only backup the pictures in the cloud.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  > pics - cloud/flickr/facebook. "cloud"? Isn't that what Dropbox is? And flickr/facebook are fine, until Facebook decides your name isn't your name, or Flickr decides to change its terms of service.
- teach 15y ago
  I have quite a few home movies of family members that take up quite a bit of space. And my personal music collection is in the 100s of gigabytes (all legally purchased and ripped from CD).
wybo 15y ago
Did this as well about a year ago (after referring many of my classmates), and it works. Getting the remaining referrals through AdWords took a bit more money than $25 though (about $30 for 10 referrals). Maybe could have improved the wording of the ad...
Osiris 15y ago
Non-education users can only get up to 10GB free with referrals. I accomplished that by putting a link on my website's download page.
scrrr 15y ago
also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3126173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3126173
sosuke 15y ago
I have an AdWords campaign with this setup, I added all the keywords, settings etc and it never gets any clicks. I upped the CPC limit and still nothing. I want it to work but it just hasn't yet.
- preek 15y ago
  Is Google giving you impressions for the ad?
  - sosuke 15y ago
    Not even impressions.
    - preek 15y ago
      Care to share how you did the setup? I guess there's something flawed. Sounds more like it's something fundamental. Is your credit card expired? Do other AdWords campaigns work?
      - sosuke 15y ago
        I have another campaign I paused when I created this one that was working. All lights are green on the interface. I've got it paused for now I figured I would try it again after the first article I had followed died down.
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  With everyone trying to do this, the CPC of every related keyword went up. Nice for people running sites that talk a lot about cloud storage and monetize with AdSense, but not so good for people trying to get free space.
- epikur 15y ago
  Adwords data is not live.
reaganing 15y ago
This is clever. I'm not sure why Dropbox doesn't offer plans with less space, and make it more affordable. For the $100/yr a 50GB account costs, you can get 100GB (plus unlimited storage of AAC/MP3 music) from Amazon via Cloud Drive. Granted, you're not getting Dropbox's excellent syncing, just storage (and streaming of music) I'd be happy to give $20-25/yr to Dropbox for 20GB-25GB of space and syncing.
iamichi 15y ago
I did this last year and hit the maximum number of referrals in 5 days for about $10. I used an Ad-words voucher as well.
ch0wn 15y ago
I did the same thing, costed me about 15 Euros to max out my referral bonus. For the first 15 signups, the conversion rate was above 40%.
jbverschoor 15y ago
Yah thanks.. got my adwords account suspended
- mkr-hn 15y ago
  Contact them and get it unsuspended.
  - southpolesteve 15y ago
    Good luck with that. AdWords is notorious for being difficult in this regard.
    - mkr-hn 15y ago
      I got my account unsuspended with a simple request.
- preek 15y ago
  Care to share what you did exactly to make that happen?
dstein64 15y ago
Another option is to use Amazon Mechanical Turk: http://codyaray.com/2010/10/dropbox-referrals-using-mechanical-turk http://codyaray.com/2010/10/dropbox-referrals-using-mechanic... Also, here's the Dropbox page to get additional space by connecting your social networking accounts: https://www.dropbox.com/free https://www.dropbox.com/free
- gravitronic 15y ago
  Using mechanical turk would be against both Amazon's ToS and Dropbox's (having the turk's sign up to a service or provide personal details / email)
  - dstein64 15y ago
    That answers the uncertainty in the blogger's disclaimer: "* Disclaimer: I can’t be sure this isn’t against the MTurk posting terms. In fact, it might be."
  - dvcat 15y ago
    I don't understand why using mturk is against Dropbox's TOS. Surely from Dropbox's pov, the privacy (or loss of privacy) is identical in both the case of mturk and adwords.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
This is an awesome idea which now, due to the HN effect, will take another 60 days before it will work again, if ever. But I plan on remembering. Very cool idea.
- dwwoelfel 15y ago
  I made a app/bookmarklet that works pretty well in these situations: http://app.reminderbear.com/ http://app.reminderbear.com/ Click on the bookmarklet and you can have the page you're on emailed to you in 2 months.
SODaniel 15y ago
With SpiderOak, all you have to do is refer 14 friends. Just throwing it out there as an alternative: https://spideroak.com https://spideroak.com
- kijin 15y ago
  I've been using SpiderOak since Dropbox's misleading-advertising-about-encryption fiasco. SpiderOak is rock stable, supports full client-side encryption, offers cheaper plans, and I also got the 50% educational discount. But the sync functionality is slow as molasses. When I log into either my desktop or my laptop, it takes several minutes before SpiderOak will actually sync any files. This gets frustrating after a while, so I sometimes just whip out a USB stick to copy the files I'd been working on. A few weeks ago I added my VPS to my SpiderOak account. It took almost an hour for initial sync to complete, despite the fact that there was nothing to sync. Dropbox, on the other hand, only takes as much time as it takes to transfer the actual file(s) back and forth. It doesn't even seem to scan the Dropbox folder for changes, or if it does, it's very quick. I can't imagine how they're doing this, but if Dropbox can do this, why can't SpiderOak?
gravitronic 15y ago
I did this last week. It was my first time using google adwords, and I learnt a couple things. Your ads: A ton of people will sign up for dropbox but not install the app, gaining you no benefit. This is probably people looking for cloud storage without the computer rights to install apps I'm guessing. My suggestion is to write in the ad copy itself that you have to download an app. When I did this I got less clicks and a higher conversion rate. Your bids: keep your bid low. My first day, I kept bumping my bid and my daily budget, and ended up spending $50 of my credit and only getting a few completed referrals. I was spending about $.80 CPC. I reduced my budget to $20/day maxand reset the CPC bid to "auto" and adwords began bidding around $.08 max per click. It took longer, but I only spent about $10/day and got a similar number of hits. Even though when I browsed the adword campaign page it generally said it was not displaying any of my ads because my bid was low, I still accumulated ~80k views/day for around $10. Your keywords: I got decent results using things like "send large file free", "share large file free", etc. When I used keywords like "dropbox" I was usually outbid by someone else who had a higher CPC set up. In the end I now have a 10GB dropbox account. Aside from my wasting $50 the first day it cost me about $10/day for 3 days to accumulate enough referrals.
rishi 15y ago
This is proof that Dropbox's referral strategy is working. This guy spent $25 to acquire a bunch of new users for DropBox. Way cheaper than what DropBox probably pays for the same users. Awesome post! Clever idea.
msutherl 15y ago
I set this up 3 hours ago and I've had 2 "Joins" and one "Completed". The 2 joins were from France. So far I have CPC on auto and capped at $0.15. Budget is at $10 per day Limited to US, UK, CA, FR English and French A mix of specific keywords (dropbox, drop box, dropbox registration) and non-specific (send large file, share files, etc.) Adwords isn't showing any data yet. Also signed up for academic Dropbox, which I did not know about. That converted my old referrals (from back when it was new) so now I'm at 4.8GB.
dmak 15y ago
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believed you were only allowed to do direct linking if that domain belonged to you. Seeing how that Dropbox referral is NOT then you could potentially get banned. Google has done ban waves before, and they will do it again.
madd_o 15y ago
It worked! In two hours, for 6 dollars, I got all the confirmed referrals. Fun way to learn how to use Adwords. Dug out an old .edu email account I had also, up to 18 gigs for "free" XD

67 points by preek 15y ago

Clever girl.

Another vote to say this works - I maxed out my Dropbox referrals for about 20 bucks a few weeks ago. This is a good way to burn those $100 AdWords credits that Google likes to hand out like candy.

ckenst 15y ago
Sounds like a good hack. How much did you spend and how much additional storage did you get?
- teach 15y ago
  He wrote "for about 20 bucks", so I suspect he spent around $20. And "maxed out my Dropbox referrals" seems to imply that he did it up to the maximum for Dropbox referrals, which is 8 GB.
  - ben1040 15y ago
    You've got the first part right, but I also happen to work for a university so I associated my .edu email address to my Dropbox account. Doing that will double your referral bonus to 500MB per referral, and double your maximum free space from referrals to 16GB.
    - docgnome 15y ago
      Did that happen right away that you got more space from your .edu? i put mine it and it didn't seem to do anything.
      - preek 15y ago
        For me it did happen instantly.
        docgnome 15y ago
        Huh. Did the text that says what you get change? Like from 250 to 500? Maybe I just don't know how much space I had heh.
        preek 15y ago
        The text changed from 250 to 500, also my available space doubled. I didn't even get an email to tell me, it just happened.
        docgnome 15y ago
        Oh. i was just doing it wrong. doh!
  - ckenst 15y ago
    I'm assuming it will be more than "about 20 bucks" once people find out about this! On the plus side its free money from Google right?

shizcakes 15y ago

I don't know why Dropbox STILL refuses to institute a 25GB plan. It's the most common complaint I hear. Now, people are giving their money to Google instead of Dropbox - that just totally seems backwards. I hope they have some really solid data showing that this is irrelevant.

roc 15y ago
I'd guess it's because the pricing doesn't work out in the aggregate. If more people would downgrade to 25GB from 50GB than would be motivated to pull out their credit-card by the inclusion of a 25GB plan, the thing would be a net loss for Dropbox. And, honestly, I can't imagine there are many people willing to pay $5/mo but unwilling to go to $10/mo. $5/mo is such a minor difference compared to the costs implicit in even having a multiple-machine sync-ing problem to solve.
- roc 15y ago
  Thinking about it more, I wonder if Dropbox's mistake here wasn't in having too-high an initial price, but in being too-generous with the storage attached to that price. 50GB is more than most people need to sync. It feels almost wasteful to have that much unused storage on a 50GB plan. Perhaps 25GB should have been $10, 50GB $15 and 100GB $20. Paying for 25GB when you only need 15GB might not feel as wasteful as paying for 50GB when you only need 15GB. Even if the net cost is the same.
  - TillE 15y ago
    That's basically what I was going to say. If you're paying $10/month for 50GB and only using a fraction of it, it feels like you're wasting money. Even if that's objectively "good value", it doesn't really matter. It's the same basic problem subscription MMOs are facing, and why so many are going free-to-play. It's also easier to convince people to pay a bunch of small one-time fees rather than a recurring monthly or yearly fee.
- timwiseman 15y ago
  I think your first point is brilliant, but your second I disagree with. $5/month is $60 a year, practically an impulse purchase for a lot of people. $10/month is $120/year. That psychologically adds an extra digit to both the monthly and years and that is also high enough to be outside impulse buy range. Anecdotally, I love dropbox, but I don't even fully use the 2GB free account (mostly text files). I would pay $60/year immediately for even a 5GB or 10GB plan on the possibility I might need it swiftly or to give me the freedom of tossing on some more pictures of the kids. But I can't justify $120/year when I still have space left ont he free account.

brador 15y ago

The article brings up an interesting point on the side. What do users need all that space for these days? Movies? - itunes/netflix/amazon, music? - itunes, games - steam, pics - cloud/flickr/facebook. The demand for large personal data storage (for non-pirates of course) is decreasing I say.

krschultz 15y ago
In my case it's pictures. Yes, some of my pictures are on Facebook and Flickr. All of them are backed up in the cloud. And I still have 3-4 different computers synced with all of them. You can download/stream music or movies, but I can never go back in time and take family pictures again. I might be overly sensitive to it because my grandparents lost all of their pictures in a storage unit fire, but I think it is a fair point. My pictures fill up approximately 40-60 GB. I have about 200 GB of other files, of which maybe 1GB is critical. If I lost the rest I wouldn't really care, so I only backup the pictures in the cloud.
pavel_lishin 15y ago
> pics - cloud/flickr/facebook. "cloud"? Isn't that what Dropbox is? And flickr/facebook are fine, until Facebook decides your name isn't your name, or Flickr decides to change its terms of service.
teach 15y ago
I have quite a few home movies of family members that take up quite a bit of space. And my personal music collection is in the 100s of gigabytes (all legally purchased and ripped from CD).

wybo 15y ago

Did this as well about a year ago (after referring many of my classmates), and it works. Getting the remaining referrals through AdWords took a bit more money than $25 though (about $30 for 10 referrals). Maybe could have improved the wording of the ad...

Osiris 15y ago

Non-education users can only get up to 10GB free with referrals. I accomplished that by putting a link on my website's download page.

scrrr 15y ago

also see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3126173 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3126173

sosuke 15y ago

I have an AdWords campaign with this setup, I added all the keywords, settings etc and it never gets any clicks. I upped the CPC limit and still nothing. I want it to work but it just hasn't yet.

preek 15y ago
Is Google giving you impressions for the ad?
- sosuke 15y ago
  Not even impressions.
  - preek 15y ago
    Care to share how you did the setup? I guess there's something flawed. Sounds more like it's something fundamental. Is your credit card expired? Do other AdWords campaigns work?
    - sosuke 15y ago
      I have another campaign I paused when I created this one that was working. All lights are green on the interface. I've got it paused for now I figured I would try it again after the first article I had followed died down.
mkr-hn 15y ago
With everyone trying to do this, the CPC of every related keyword went up. Nice for people running sites that talk a lot about cloud storage and monetize with AdSense, but not so good for people trying to get free space.
epikur 15y ago
Adwords data is not live.

reaganing 15y ago

This is clever. I'm not sure why Dropbox doesn't offer plans with less space, and make it more affordable. For the $100/yr a 50GB account costs, you can get 100GB (plus unlimited storage of AAC/MP3 music) from Amazon via Cloud Drive. Granted, you're not getting Dropbox's excellent syncing, just storage (and streaming of music) I'd be happy to give $20-25/yr to Dropbox for 20GB-25GB of space and syncing.

iamichi 15y ago

I did this last year and hit the maximum number of referrals in 5 days for about $10. I used an Ad-words voucher as well.

ch0wn 15y ago

I did the same thing, costed me about 15 Euros to max out my referral bonus. For the first 15 signups, the conversion rate was above 40%.

jbverschoor 15y ago

Yah thanks.. got my adwords account suspended

mkr-hn 15y ago
Contact them and get it unsuspended.
- southpolesteve 15y ago
  Good luck with that. AdWords is notorious for being difficult in this regard.
  - mkr-hn 15y ago
    I got my account unsuspended with a simple request.
preek 15y ago
Care to share what you did exactly to make that happen?

dstein64 15y ago

Another option is to use Amazon Mechanical Turk: http://codyaray.com/2010/10/dropbox-referrals-using-mechanical-turk http://codyaray.com/2010/10/dropbox-referrals-using-mechanic... Also, here's the Dropbox page to get additional space by connecting your social networking accounts: https://www.dropbox.com/free https://www.dropbox.com/free

gravitronic 15y ago
Using mechanical turk would be against both Amazon's ToS and Dropbox's (having the turk's sign up to a service or provide personal details / email)
- dstein64 15y ago
  That answers the uncertainty in the blogger's disclaimer: "* Disclaimer: I can’t be sure this isn’t against the MTurk posting terms. In fact, it might be."
- dvcat 15y ago
  I don't understand why using mturk is against Dropbox's TOS. Surely from Dropbox's pov, the privacy (or loss of privacy) is identical in both the case of mturk and adwords.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

This is an awesome idea which now, due to the HN effect, will take another 60 days before it will work again, if ever. But I plan on remembering. Very cool idea.

dwwoelfel 15y ago
I made a app/bookmarklet that works pretty well in these situations: http://app.reminderbear.com/ http://app.reminderbear.com/ Click on the bookmarklet and you can have the page you're on emailed to you in 2 months.

SODaniel 15y ago

With SpiderOak, all you have to do is refer 14 friends. Just throwing it out there as an alternative: https://spideroak.com https://spideroak.com

kijin 15y ago
I've been using SpiderOak since Dropbox's misleading-advertising-about-encryption fiasco. SpiderOak is rock stable, supports full client-side encryption, offers cheaper plans, and I also got the 50% educational discount. But the sync functionality is slow as molasses. When I log into either my desktop or my laptop, it takes several minutes before SpiderOak will actually sync any files. This gets frustrating after a while, so I sometimes just whip out a USB stick to copy the files I'd been working on. A few weeks ago I added my VPS to my SpiderOak account. It took almost an hour for initial sync to complete, despite the fact that there was nothing to sync. Dropbox, on the other hand, only takes as much time as it takes to transfer the actual file(s) back and forth. It doesn't even seem to scan the Dropbox folder for changes, or if it does, it's very quick. I can't imagine how they're doing this, but if Dropbox can do this, why can't SpiderOak?

gravitronic 15y ago

I did this last week. It was my first time using google adwords, and I learnt a couple things. Your ads: A ton of people will sign up for dropbox but not install the app, gaining you no benefit. This is probably people looking for cloud storage without the computer rights to install apps I'm guessing. My suggestion is to write in the ad copy itself that you have to download an app. When I did this I got less clicks and a higher conversion rate. Your bids: keep your bid low. My first day, I kept bumping my bid and my daily budget, and ended up spending $50 of my credit and only getting a few completed referrals. I was spending about $.80 CPC. I reduced my budget to $20/day maxand reset the CPC bid to "auto" and adwords began bidding around $.08 max per click. It took longer, but I only spent about $10/day and got a similar number of hits. Even though when I browsed the adword campaign page it generally said it was not displaying any of my ads because my bid was low, I still accumulated ~80k views/day for around $10. Your keywords: I got decent results using things like "send large file free", "share large file free", etc. When I used keywords like "dropbox" I was usually outbid by someone else who had a higher CPC set up. In the end I now have a 10GB dropbox account. Aside from my wasting $50 the first day it cost me about $10/day for 3 days to accumulate enough referrals.

rishi 15y ago

This is proof that Dropbox's referral strategy is working. This guy spent $25 to acquire a bunch of new users for DropBox. Way cheaper than what DropBox probably pays for the same users. Awesome post! Clever idea.

msutherl 15y ago

I set this up 3 hours ago and I've had 2 "Joins" and one "Completed". The 2 joins were from France. So far I have CPC on auto and capped at $0.15. Budget is at $10 per day Limited to US, UK, CA, FR English and French A mix of specific keywords (dropbox, drop box, dropbox registration) and non-specific (send large file, share files, etc.) Adwords isn't showing any data yet. Also signed up for academic Dropbox, which I did not know about. That converted my old referrals (from back when it was new) so now I'm at 4.8GB.

dmak 15y ago

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believed you were only allowed to do direct linking if that domain belonged to you. Seeing how that Dropbox referral is NOT then you could potentially get banned. Google has done ban waves before, and they will do it again.

madd_o 15y ago

It worked! In two hours, for 6 dollars, I got all the confirmed referrals. Fun way to learn how to use Adwords. Dug out an old .edu email account I had also, up to 18 gigs for "free" XD