3 ms·

Are there really people who are turned off by dropbox prices? I would take notice if someone made a dropbox with a valuable additional feature, or a dropbox th

by dbecker 13y ago

Are there really people who are turned off by dropbox prices? I would take notice if someone made a dropbox with a valuable additional feature, or a dropbox that worked better (recognizing that already dropbox works very smoothly). But price seems like a nonstarter.

drdaeman 13y ago
I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage, but they don't offer anything in that area. This service does, and for an astonishingly great price. 10TiB for 10€, and they even promised something about internal 3x storage redundancy. I'm unzipping my wallet right after I run basic checks with free account.
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  > I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage ... That's what I'm using Amazon Glacier for. I have tons of old files that I'll likely never need/want again and that I would normally just blow away in order to regain the disk space. It's so damn cheap, though, that I've started archiving them all to Glacier and then blowing them away.
  - drdaeman 13y ago
    Well, this offer seems to be about 10x cheaper. Not to say you don't have to wait for hours before you retrieve the file, and it's flat rate, not "download some percent from what you've uploaded today for free, otherwise pay for the bandwidth" plan. For example, I've used Bitcasa before, but consider them too unreliable as a long-term business and left their service. It didn't cost me a cent to pull all the data back (with some minor exceptions their buggy software managed to lose unrecoverably, but I never considered them rock-solid-reliable from the beginning and had backups). With Glacier, I guess, I'd have to shell out $150 (~1.5TB) just to leave with my data. There are other unlimited/large storage offers of various pricing and quality, but this one seem the best to me this far because of OpenStack API (I'd wish Cyphertite had a datacenter in Europe or Russia, but nope, so they're too slow for me, and I'm not really sure even though they're "unlimited" they'll be happy with terabyte archives). That is, unless one has more than 10 terabytes to archive.
nodata 13y ago
Every personal user I know doesn't upgrade to the next tier because of the price.
- antr 13y ago
  I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. They need a $5/month bucket, DigitalOcean style. IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition and would take in tonnes of cash. Making it the Spotify of storage.
  - oijaf888 13y ago
    Would that cover their S3 costs to store the data?
  - jlgaddis 13y ago
    > I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. I've long thought the same thing, both on their personal and business accounts. On the personal side, the free 2 GB account isn't quite enough for my needs but 100 GB is waaaaay more than what I'd use. > IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition ... I'd happily pay that. Hell, I'd pay $5/month for, say, 20 GB. Realistically, I'd rarely use more than 10 GB. It's the same story on the business side. My small team of eight would love to use Dropbox but, again, it's not a huge amount of storage that we need -- 10 GB would likely be more than we'd ever use. Instead, it's the ease with which we can all share that 10 GB of files that I'd happily pay for. That 10 GB of storage would cost us $120/mo. (it could be as low as $80/month, but we could/would use those extra features so I'd go for the higher level). Granted, $120/month isn't a lot and it would be much easier to justify if we were going to come close to using the whole 100 GB of storage. Since we effectively need to be able to easily share the contents of a small USB flash drive, though, $120/mo. seems a little outrageous. At the very least, it seems that "per-user" isn't the best option in all cases and that other methods of charging would be a better fit. For example, there are a few non-technical people in our office that we might consider adding. They would rarely need access to any of the files we'd store on Dropbox but it might be nice to have them as users "just in case" -- but not for $15/user/month. In our case, Dropbox would quickly gain us as a customer if we could instead pay based upon the amount of storage we use (it seems ironic that this isn't an option, considering storage is likely one of their highest costs). We would, for example, sign up today if there was a "$1/GB/month regardless of number of users" option. As an added bonus, our daily use of Dropbox would likely result in us recommending it to many of our customers who would also sign up (if they could also pay based upon storage and not the number of users).

by dbecker 13y ago

drdaeman 13y ago

I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage, but they don't offer anything in that area. This service does, and for an astonishingly great price. 10TiB for 10€, and they even promised something about internal 3x storage redundancy. I'm unzipping my wallet right after I run basic checks with free account.

jlgaddis 13y ago
> I'd use Dropbox as write-once-read-occasionally personal junk archival storage ... That's what I'm using Amazon Glacier for. I have tons of old files that I'll likely never need/want again and that I would normally just blow away in order to regain the disk space. It's so damn cheap, though, that I've started archiving them all to Glacier and then blowing them away.
- drdaeman 13y ago
  Well, this offer seems to be about 10x cheaper. Not to say you don't have to wait for hours before you retrieve the file, and it's flat rate, not "download some percent from what you've uploaded today for free, otherwise pay for the bandwidth" plan. For example, I've used Bitcasa before, but consider them too unreliable as a long-term business and left their service. It didn't cost me a cent to pull all the data back (with some minor exceptions their buggy software managed to lose unrecoverably, but I never considered them rock-solid-reliable from the beginning and had backups). With Glacier, I guess, I'd have to shell out $150 (~1.5TB) just to leave with my data. There are other unlimited/large storage offers of various pricing and quality, but this one seem the best to me this far because of OpenStack API (I'd wish Cyphertite had a datacenter in Europe or Russia, but nope, so they're too slow for me, and I'm not really sure even though they're "unlimited" they'll be happy with terabyte archives). That is, unless one has more than 10 terabytes to archive.

nodata 13y ago

Every personal user I know doesn't upgrade to the next tier because of the price.

antr 13y ago
I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. They need a $5/month bucket, DigitalOcean style. IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition and would take in tonnes of cash. Making it the Spotify of storage.
- oijaf888 13y ago
  Would that cover their S3 costs to store the data?
- jlgaddis 13y ago
  > I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure. I've long thought the same thing, both on their personal and business accounts. On the personal side, the free 2 GB account isn't quite enough for my needs but 100 GB is waaaaay more than what I'd use. > IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition ... I'd happily pay that. Hell, I'd pay $5/month for, say, 20 GB. Realistically, I'd rarely use more than 10 GB. It's the same story on the business side. My small team of eight would love to use Dropbox but, again, it's not a huge amount of storage that we need -- 10 GB would likely be more than we'd ever use. Instead, it's the ease with which we can all share that 10 GB of files that I'd happily pay for. That 10 GB of storage would cost us $120/mo. (it could be as low as $80/month, but we could/would use those extra features so I'd go for the higher level). Granted, $120/month isn't a lot and it would be much easier to justify if we were going to come close to using the whole 100 GB of storage. Since we effectively need to be able to easily share the contents of a small USB flash drive, though, $120/mo. seems a little outrageous. At the very least, it seems that "per-user" isn't the best option in all cases and that other methods of charging would be a better fit. For example, there are a few non-technical people in our office that we might consider adding. They would rarely need access to any of the files we'd store on Dropbox but it might be nice to have them as users "just in case" -- but not for $15/user/month. In our case, Dropbox would quickly gain us as a customer if we could instead pay based upon the amount of storage we use (it seems ironic that this isn't an option, considering storage is likely one of their highest costs). We would, for example, sign up today if there was a "$1/GB/month regardless of number of users" option. As an added bonus, our daily use of Dropbox would likely result in us recommending it to many of our customers who would also sign up (if they could also pay based upon storage and not the number of users).