8 ms·

I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though. Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.

by cletus 14y ago

bossfo 14y ago
> I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Agreed. For those of us who use less storage (and especially 30 GB or less), Google Drive is clearly the better deal. Although others seem to have experienced problems with Google Drive, it has worked essentially flawlessly for me and, because of that, I plan to let my Dropbox subscription expire. For every person who wants to keep 100 GB of data synched, I bet there are at least five who want to synch 30 GB or less.
- jabits 14y ago
  Although Microsoft is not as cool these days, I am liking the new SkyDrive (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/skydrive/compare http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/skydrive/compare). (I also use a paid SpiderOak account for backup and sharing.)
  - sigkill 14y ago
    Iirc skydrive offers 25 gigs. I wonder why they're saying just 7 though. EDIT - Yep my account says 25. I'm thoroughly confused.
    - nickbarnwell 14y ago
      If my memory is correct, when they merged it back into the Live brand they also downgraded the standard storage space to 7GB. If you logged in sometime during the transition period or clicked on a special link that they sent out in an email you got to preserve your 25GB of storage.
      - jabits 14y ago
        Yes, this is what happened. I have the 25 gig as well.
      - pca 14y ago
        It wasn't a login, you had to have at least one file on your skydrive before the recent merge to keep the 25GB. Effectively you now can get e.g. 45GB for 10$ a year. Dropbox' old 50GB for 10$ a month plan was a joke in comparison.
    - lebski88 14y ago
      They launched with 25 gigs but that was only a short term promotion at the start of this year. 7 gigs is their standard free offering. Anyone who signed up during the promotion period gets to keep 25 gigs free though of course.
      - sigkill 14y ago
        Oh I see. I had no idea that it was a promotion. I guess I got lucky. :)
  - rlu 14y ago
    Ditto. Sidenote: SkyDrive's "fetch" feature is awesome. Can grab any file on my computer even if it isn't in my skydrive folder.
- TylerE 14y ago
  Perhaps they've run the numbers, and decided that a fair price for, say, a 25G account is less than the hassle of having to do billing is worth?
FrojoS 14y ago
So do I, and I think 99% of all Dropbox users at some point. Why then, don't they do it? I think, its because this makes getting "free additional space" so very attractive. You envite lots of friends and colleges in order to grow to a few GB [1]. I would guess this is one of the biggest reasons for Dropbox's success. [1] For instance, I have 8.4 GB by now, without cheating. This more or less meets my needs.
- donw 14y ago
  It's a brilliant strategy, isn't it? User acquisition costs for a product like Dropbox can be fairly significant, especially if you're going toe-to-toe with everybody else in Google. On the other hand, a gig of storage borders on free for Dropbox, but the marginal utility of that storage is pretty significant for the user, providing a strong motivation to actively recommend (an admittedly excellent) service to their friends. You get more storage for 'free', Dropbox saves a bucket of money on advertising. It's genius.
  - FrojoS 14y ago
    Right. And, actually, some people who "cheat" might help Dropbox even more. It used to be quite a common "trick" to pay for Google Ads that link to your personal Dropbox referral link.
    - lifeformed 14y ago
      Or the old, "refer-a-bunch-of-fake-accounts-and-activate-them-each-on-a-VM" cheat.
- plasticgun 14y ago
  I just logged in to my unused dropbox account with my galaxy s3 ... surprisingly, I get 48gb for free for 2 years just for having a samsung phone ... thats a nice touch :)
wikwocket 14y ago
The lack of a plan between tiny and huge may be intentional. Cellphone providers seem to work the same way, offering cheap starter plans with just enough minutes so you either go over each month, and consider upgrading to the massive plan. If only cell providers also followed this precedent of regularly stepping down the price of all the plans!
Wintamute 14y ago
There's a reason Dropbox won't introduce smaller plans. As it stands the vast majority of Dropbox Pro users aren't filling up their boxes much at all, effectively paying for capacity and bandwidth they're not using, and subsidizing a minority of superusers that are maxxing out. If Dropbox introduced a 25GB plan a vast chunk of their user base would switch to it, Dropbox's hosting costs would hardly change (users aren't using most of their space), but their income from subscriptions would drop massively.
- T-hawk 14y ago
  Right. It's not that Dropbox doesn't want to offer less than 50 GB, it's that they don't want to be charging anything less than $10/month. Customers that care about the difference between $5 and $10 per month are not going to make a business rich. You will not get twice the paying audience at $5 than at $10. And it runs into pathological customer territory; statistically in all walks of software and technology, the cheapskates are the greater support nuisance.
  - lucisferre 14y ago
    And neither are customers paying zero. Personally Im not that thrilled about buying into something where I subsidize a sizable free tier. I love Dropbox, but I can't justify $10 a month for just personal doc storage. Dropbox isnt great for collaborative sharing (becuause you can't have 'shared' space) it isn't a proper backup service (I use crash plan for that) so basically it's personal storage. In that market $5 is all I'm willing to part with.
    - bmelton 14y ago
      We use it at my company all the time as shared space. I can't 'share' it to an unlimited number of people, mind you, but I can't imagine a scenario in which I would. Regardless, it's a pretty good collaborative tool, super for backup of important documents, and yeah, personal doc storage, but as I've spread it out across 6 different PCs, it's a great sync service too. That said, I'm no longer paying for Dropbox in lieu of Google Drive. Perhaps their cost model is more to your approval?
lelandbatey 14y ago
If I may just say: I have Google Drive, and am loving it. It's much cheaper than dropbox, as I pay only $5 and get 100GB of space. That's WAY more than I need, but it syncs to all my devices. However, I will be the first to say that DropBox has some really great features that Google Drive lacks. For example, there is no public folder for Google Drive, like there is for Dropbox, and I cannot throttle the speed at which Google Drive syncs. With a new laptop transferring 20+GB of data, I unwittingly maxed out a 100mbit connection. For Dropbox users my question is: is Google Drive not worth it? Do the features offered by Dropbox make it more worthwhile than Google Drive, even if the raw storage costs more?
- dalanmiller 14y ago
  p.s. the Public folder is going away. http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-really-removing-their-Public-folder-feature http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-really-removing-...
  - appliedluck 14y ago
    You can add Public folder functionality to any file or folder. See http://www.dropbox.com/help/167 http://www.dropbox.com/help/167
    - gergles 14y ago
      No, you can't, because that generates one-off links with gibberish in the URL and forces the disposition to "download" instead of just sending the file.
  - iso-8859-1 14y ago
    no, it isn't. just has to be manually enabled. http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=62403&replies=10#post-445432 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=62403&replies=10#...
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  Does Google Drive do LAN sync? Like any self respecting geek I have far too many computers and LAN sync keeps the bandwidth down, especially on freshly installed systems. I'm also primarily on Linux so Google Drive is useless to me. (Yes I know about grive.) My biggest peeve with Dropbox is that it doesn't know about multiple users. I have a personal paid account, as well as a separate team account for work. All of their software and sites work as though you only have one account, which is a huge pain. Separately they also screw over paid accounts who share folders. For example if two users each get a paid account for 50GB each and the first one shared 10GB of content with the second, then the second will only be able to use 40GB for their own files. So there will only be a total of 90GB of unique storage even though 100GB has been paid for. I understand (and agree) why they do this with free accounts, but their support kept refusing to see why it is an issue when both accounts are paid. The users issue and shared space issues mean I'm highly likely to move to Google once they support Linux.
JesseAldridge 14y ago
I don't know. $10 a month really doesn't seem like a lot of money to me. Especially considering the cost of, say, the computers you're running it on.
- timwiseman 14y ago
  It depends on what you are doing with it and what you are comparing it to. For 50 Gigs, its extremely cheap. But if you really say want 5 gigs, then $10 a month seems a bit high, especially now that Gdrive gives you 5 gigs free. Its also a bit of a pyschological barrier seeing that second digit in the monthly bill as opposed to say $5/month and knowing that the yearly cost breaches the triple digit barrier.
- Derbasti 14y ago
  Hypothetically speaking, you could be running on a cheap laptop that you bought used for some $200. One and a half years of using Dropbox would cost about the same amount. Realistically though, I totally agree.
- zurn 14y ago
  It will double the cost of a typical consumer laptop ($500 laptop used for 4 years) or add a third to the cost of a high end $1500 laptop.
g3orge 14y ago
yes. I want less than 50. Not more. I'd like to be able to purchase with a one-time fee some GBs. (10 for example)
nahname 14y ago
There is a plan between the two, but you pay for it with time. https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Referrals https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Referrals
tallanvor 14y ago
That's why I'm using both Dropbox and Skydrive now. --If I'm likely to need to access it on my phone, I put it on Dropbox since the app is nicer, but I joined Skydrive early enough that I have 25GB free, and if I really need more, adding 100GB for $50/year is less than half the cost of what Dropbox charges.
Bvalmont 14y ago
I sent them an e-mail when I was looking into dropbox and they offered me 10G, 20G or 25G for a slightly smaller price. I'm not sure if the offer still stands, though. I got into it when they just launched. Edit: Looking at the e-mail they stated this is a one-time limited offer. But still worth a try.
pbiggar 14y ago
This comment kinda annoys me. Let's say Dropbox had a 5GB plan for $10 (let's assume that's the price of their lowest plan - I'm not sure). So, people with 4GB would say "this is good value". But suppose they offer even better value and allow 100GB for the same price. Now it's perceived as bad value for the 4GB user, and they want a cheaper plan. In fact, we had the same problem at my startup. We had a plan with 1-way parallelism, and a plan with 8-way parallelism (we do hosted continuous integration - https://circleci.com https://circleci.com). Many of our customers said "oh, I don't need 8-way, so I don't want to pay for it". When we changed it to 4-way (for the same price as 8-way), the uptake was much higher, as they perceived it was something they'd use. Go figure.
- ohgodthecat3 14y ago
  That isn't exactly the same what he is saying is that for many of us we can't justify the $10 dollar plan enough to purchase dropbox but would purchase the $5 dollar plan at 25gb or 50gb or half the ten dollar plans size. This isn't to say it would be a good idea for dropbox to offer this whether they make more money now or with the cheaper plan is unclear to us just many people want a $5/month $50/year plan.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
marquis 14y ago
Somehow I still have a 10GB plan which is sufficient for what I need right now. I can't remember when I bought it and I don't expect it to turn into 50GB automatically this evening..
jpalomaki 14y ago
I think the reasoning goes so that of those who are willing to pay something, most are willing to pay $9.90/month. If there was a smaller plan with lower price, quite many would probably go for that one, instead of paying the $9.90.

I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though. Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.

by cletus 14y ago

I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Kudos foe the increased storage though. Not having the pricing page live yet is kinda weird.

bossfo 14y ago

> I really wish there was a plan between free and 50G (now 100G). Agreed. For those of us who use less storage (and especially 30 GB or less), Google Drive is clearly the better deal. Although others seem to have experienced problems with Google Drive, it has worked essentially flawlessly for me and, because of that, I plan to let my Dropbox subscription expire. For every person who wants to keep 100 GB of data synched, I bet there are at least five who want to synch 30 GB or less.

jabits 14y ago
Although Microsoft is not as cool these days, I am liking the new SkyDrive (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/skydrive/compare http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/skydrive/compare). (I also use a paid SpiderOak account for backup and sharing.)
- sigkill 14y ago
  Iirc skydrive offers 25 gigs. I wonder why they're saying just 7 though. EDIT - Yep my account says 25. I'm thoroughly confused.
  - nickbarnwell 14y ago
    If my memory is correct, when they merged it back into the Live brand they also downgraded the standard storage space to 7GB. If you logged in sometime during the transition period or clicked on a special link that they sent out in an email you got to preserve your 25GB of storage.
    - jabits 14y ago
      Yes, this is what happened. I have the 25 gig as well.
    - pca 14y ago
      It wasn't a login, you had to have at least one file on your skydrive before the recent merge to keep the 25GB. Effectively you now can get e.g. 45GB for 10$ a year. Dropbox' old 50GB for 10$ a month plan was a joke in comparison.
  - lebski88 14y ago
    They launched with 25 gigs but that was only a short term promotion at the start of this year. 7 gigs is their standard free offering. Anyone who signed up during the promotion period gets to keep 25 gigs free though of course.
    - sigkill 14y ago
      Oh I see. I had no idea that it was a promotion. I guess I got lucky. :)
- rlu 14y ago
  Ditto. Sidenote: SkyDrive's "fetch" feature is awesome. Can grab any file on my computer even if it isn't in my skydrive folder.
TylerE 14y ago
Perhaps they've run the numbers, and decided that a fair price for, say, a 25G account is less than the hassle of having to do billing is worth?

FrojoS 14y ago

So do I, and I think 99% of all Dropbox users at some point. Why then, don't they do it? I think, its because this makes getting "free additional space" so very attractive. You envite lots of friends and colleges in order to grow to a few GB [1]. I would guess this is one of the biggest reasons for Dropbox's success. [1] For instance, I have 8.4 GB by now, without cheating. This more or less meets my needs.

donw 14y ago
It's a brilliant strategy, isn't it? User acquisition costs for a product like Dropbox can be fairly significant, especially if you're going toe-to-toe with everybody else in Google. On the other hand, a gig of storage borders on free for Dropbox, but the marginal utility of that storage is pretty significant for the user, providing a strong motivation to actively recommend (an admittedly excellent) service to their friends. You get more storage for 'free', Dropbox saves a bucket of money on advertising. It's genius.
- FrojoS 14y ago
  Right. And, actually, some people who "cheat" might help Dropbox even more. It used to be quite a common "trick" to pay for Google Ads that link to your personal Dropbox referral link.
  - lifeformed 14y ago
    Or the old, "refer-a-bunch-of-fake-accounts-and-activate-them-each-on-a-VM" cheat.
plasticgun 14y ago
I just logged in to my unused dropbox account with my galaxy s3 ... surprisingly, I get 48gb for free for 2 years just for having a samsung phone ... thats a nice touch :)

wikwocket 14y ago

The lack of a plan between tiny and huge may be intentional. Cellphone providers seem to work the same way, offering cheap starter plans with just enough minutes so you either go over each month, and consider upgrading to the massive plan. If only cell providers also followed this precedent of regularly stepping down the price of all the plans!

Wintamute 14y ago

There's a reason Dropbox won't introduce smaller plans. As it stands the vast majority of Dropbox Pro users aren't filling up their boxes much at all, effectively paying for capacity and bandwidth they're not using, and subsidizing a minority of superusers that are maxxing out. If Dropbox introduced a 25GB plan a vast chunk of their user base would switch to it, Dropbox's hosting costs would hardly change (users aren't using most of their space), but their income from subscriptions would drop massively.

T-hawk 14y ago
Right. It's not that Dropbox doesn't want to offer less than 50 GB, it's that they don't want to be charging anything less than $10/month. Customers that care about the difference between $5 and $10 per month are not going to make a business rich. You will not get twice the paying audience at $5 than at $10. And it runs into pathological customer territory; statistically in all walks of software and technology, the cheapskates are the greater support nuisance.
- lucisferre 14y ago
  And neither are customers paying zero. Personally Im not that thrilled about buying into something where I subsidize a sizable free tier. I love Dropbox, but I can't justify $10 a month for just personal doc storage. Dropbox isnt great for collaborative sharing (becuause you can't have 'shared' space) it isn't a proper backup service (I use crash plan for that) so basically it's personal storage. In that market $5 is all I'm willing to part with.
  - bmelton 14y ago
    We use it at my company all the time as shared space. I can't 'share' it to an unlimited number of people, mind you, but I can't imagine a scenario in which I would. Regardless, it's a pretty good collaborative tool, super for backup of important documents, and yeah, personal doc storage, but as I've spread it out across 6 different PCs, it's a great sync service too. That said, I'm no longer paying for Dropbox in lieu of Google Drive. Perhaps their cost model is more to your approval?

lelandbatey 14y ago

If I may just say: I have Google Drive, and am loving it. It's much cheaper than dropbox, as I pay only $5 and get 100GB of space. That's WAY more than I need, but it syncs to all my devices. However, I will be the first to say that DropBox has some really great features that Google Drive lacks. For example, there is no public folder for Google Drive, like there is for Dropbox, and I cannot throttle the speed at which Google Drive syncs. With a new laptop transferring 20+GB of data, I unwittingly maxed out a 100mbit connection. For Dropbox users my question is: is Google Drive not worth it? Do the features offered by Dropbox make it more worthwhile than Google Drive, even if the raw storage costs more?

dalanmiller 14y ago
p.s. the Public folder is going away. http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-really-removing-their-Public-folder-feature http://www.quora.com/Dropbox/Why-is-Dropbox-really-removing-...
- appliedluck 14y ago
  You can add Public folder functionality to any file or folder. See http://www.dropbox.com/help/167 http://www.dropbox.com/help/167
  - gergles 14y ago
    No, you can't, because that generates one-off links with gibberish in the URL and forces the disposition to "download" instead of just sending the file.
- iso-8859-1 14y ago
  no, it isn't. just has to be manually enabled. http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=62403&replies=10#post-445432 http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=62403&replies=10#...
rogerbinns 14y ago
Does Google Drive do LAN sync? Like any self respecting geek I have far too many computers and LAN sync keeps the bandwidth down, especially on freshly installed systems. I'm also primarily on Linux so Google Drive is useless to me. (Yes I know about grive.) My biggest peeve with Dropbox is that it doesn't know about multiple users. I have a personal paid account, as well as a separate team account for work. All of their software and sites work as though you only have one account, which is a huge pain. Separately they also screw over paid accounts who share folders. For example if two users each get a paid account for 50GB each and the first one shared 10GB of content with the second, then the second will only be able to use 40GB for their own files. So there will only be a total of 90GB of unique storage even though 100GB has been paid for. I understand (and agree) why they do this with free accounts, but their support kept refusing to see why it is an issue when both accounts are paid. The users issue and shared space issues mean I'm highly likely to move to Google once they support Linux.

JesseAldridge 14y ago

I don't know. $10 a month really doesn't seem like a lot of money to me. Especially considering the cost of, say, the computers you're running it on.

timwiseman 14y ago
It depends on what you are doing with it and what you are comparing it to. For 50 Gigs, its extremely cheap. But if you really say want 5 gigs, then $10 a month seems a bit high, especially now that Gdrive gives you 5 gigs free. Its also a bit of a pyschological barrier seeing that second digit in the monthly bill as opposed to say $5/month and knowing that the yearly cost breaches the triple digit barrier.
Derbasti 14y ago
Hypothetically speaking, you could be running on a cheap laptop that you bought used for some $200. One and a half years of using Dropbox would cost about the same amount. Realistically though, I totally agree.
zurn 14y ago
It will double the cost of a typical consumer laptop ($500 laptop used for 4 years) or add a third to the cost of a high end $1500 laptop.

g3orge 14y ago

yes. I want less than 50. Not more. I'd like to be able to purchase with a one-time fee some GBs. (10 for example)

nahname 14y ago

There is a plan between the two, but you pay for it with time. https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Referrals https://www.dropbox.com/help/category/Referrals

tallanvor 14y ago

That's why I'm using both Dropbox and Skydrive now. --If I'm likely to need to access it on my phone, I put it on Dropbox since the app is nicer, but I joined Skydrive early enough that I have 25GB free, and if I really need more, adding 100GB for $50/year is less than half the cost of what Dropbox charges.

Bvalmont 14y ago

I sent them an e-mail when I was looking into dropbox and they offered me 10G, 20G or 25G for a slightly smaller price. I'm not sure if the offer still stands, though. I got into it when they just launched. Edit: Looking at the e-mail they stated this is a one-time limited offer. But still worth a try.

pbiggar 14y ago

This comment kinda annoys me. Let's say Dropbox had a 5GB plan for $10 (let's assume that's the price of their lowest plan - I'm not sure). So, people with 4GB would say "this is good value". But suppose they offer even better value and allow 100GB for the same price. Now it's perceived as bad value for the 4GB user, and they want a cheaper plan. In fact, we had the same problem at my startup. We had a plan with 1-way parallelism, and a plan with 8-way parallelism (we do hosted continuous integration - https://circleci.com https://circleci.com). Many of our customers said "oh, I don't need 8-way, so I don't want to pay for it". When we changed it to 4-way (for the same price as 8-way), the uptake was much higher, as they perceived it was something they'd use. Go figure.

ohgodthecat3 14y ago
That isn't exactly the same what he is saying is that for many of us we can't justify the $10 dollar plan enough to purchase dropbox but would purchase the $5 dollar plan at 25gb or 50gb or half the ten dollar plans size. This isn't to say it would be a good idea for dropbox to offer this whether they make more money now or with the cheaper plan is unclear to us just many people want a $5/month $50/year plan.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

marquis 14y ago

Somehow I still have a 10GB plan which is sufficient for what I need right now. I can't remember when I bought it and I don't expect it to turn into 50GB automatically this evening..

jpalomaki 14y ago

I think the reasoning goes so that of those who are willing to pay something, most are willing to pay $9.90/month. If there was a smaller plan with lower price, quite many would probably go for that one, instead of paying the $9.90.