You can get 14 TB drives retail for ~$200. That's ~$14.28/TB. I don't know Dropbox's Enterprise storage pricing, but I know Backblaze charges $5/TB for simple

You can get 14 TB drives retail for ~$200. That's ~$14.28/TB. I don't know Dropbox's Enterprise storage pricing, but I know Backblaze charges $5/TB for simple cloud storage. That means, ignoring drive failures and redundancy, it takes less than 3 months to RoI on hard drive purchases. With the high level of redundancy these services tend to have, it's probably closer to 1-2 years. On the flip side, AWS S3's standard storage tier is a whopping $23/TB. They're making absolute bank on that. Not to mention their stupidly high egress fees (Which are even higher when using Glacier!) if you ever actually use it.