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Great move. Brings pricing on bar with Google Drive, Microsoft One Store and probalbly the upcoming iCloud Drive. I wonder if they still keep everything on Ama

Great move. Brings pricing on bar with Google Drive, Microsoft One Store and probalbly the upcoming iCloud Drive. I wonder if they still keep everything on Amazon S3. I'm sure most users will not fill up the Terabyte, but still S3 costs 330USD per Terabyte per year (not including costs for outbound traffic) (http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ http://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/).

sz4kerto 12y ago
Well, almost (I paid 79 euros for 1TB + Office 2013). I don't really see how Dropbox is going to survive this price war as the others don't need to directly profit from these services (at least not in the near future). Dropbox cannot really cross-finance the storage costs as this is its main business.
- fludlight 12y ago
  Google, MS, and Apple can also afford to abandon or kill their cloud storage services. They'll do just that if said services don't generate a billion dollars a year in revenue fast enough. Dropbox, however, is a one trick pony. Expect them to stick around as a premium priced service. Until someone acquires them and ruins everything...
  - danudey 12y ago
    Apple's strategy has never been to create products just for kicks and kill them off later. They spend a lot of time thinking about what they should be making, and focus just on that. I trust that iCloud, in some iteration, will be around for as long as people are buying iMacs and iPhones. Microsoft, miraculously, has been changing their spots lately, but I expect Windows Live Folders – I mean, Windows Live Skydive – or wait, just Skydive – er, I mean Onedrive – will be around in some iteration. What that will mean, though, is another question. They killed off Games for Windows Live pretty unceremoniously, and now Dark Souls, among other games, just straight up won't work properly. You can't save your game if you aren't connected to Games for Windows Live, which you can't do, retroactively crippling third party games. So for throwing my documents onto so that they still exist after I wipe my Windows machine for the Nth time, Skydive is great, but I don't yet trust them to change direction/focus and ruin any plans businesses have made around them. Google… well, they've cancelled enough stuff that I can't trust them with anything important related to business or lifestyle both.
- cwyers 12y ago
  I pay $9.99 a month for Office 365, which comes with a terabyte of OneDrive. Except that I can have five accounts on my Office 365 subscription, and EACH OF THEM gets a terabyte of OneDrive, plus each gets full access to Office 2013 and the Office webapps. It's a much better deal than Dropbox, even after this price drop.
  - NicoJuicy 12y ago
    OneDrive for business is like $2.5 / user / month for 1 TB... Which is still a much better deal then Dropbox.
jonknee 12y ago
They de-dupe files and surely have negotiated with Amazon. Still seems like they should start opening their own data centers otherwise they never have a chance beating their own supplier at price.
- danudey 12y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy up a company like Backblaze. It seems like a reasonable fit; Dropbox is already moving from document sync to 'all your stuff' sync. Adding straight-up backup would be a logical next step, and Backblaze has a huge amount of experience designing, building, and managing massive storage infrastructure. The biggest difference with Backblaze would seem to be that their service can easily assume minimal reads; besides the backup index, the vast majority of their disk usage is probably one-time writes, plus the occasional massive bulk read.
demircancelebi 12y ago
How did you come up with that price?
kjaspal 12y ago
As far as I understand Dropbox is still using Amazon S3. S3 according to their pricing calculator is roughly $26/month per TB (not including outbound traffic). I'm sure because of Dropbox's multi-PetaByte scale they have negotiated better prices with AWS. I wouldn't be surprised if they are paying $20/month per TB. The amount Amazon charges for data-transfer is quite crazy roughly $120/month per TB. If about 10% of data on dropbox is transferred out on a monthly basis than Dropbox total cost for storage is roughly $20 + 0.1 * $120 = $32/month per TB. Thus in order to break-even they are probably expecting the average paying user to use less than 30% of the 1 TB space. (In reality that is less since Dropbox has a free-tier they need to amortize along with marketing expenses, employee costs etc ..)
- ksec 12y ago
  I think that is the reason why they dont do other smaller plans. And adding data dedup along with some heavy discount to your equation they may break even with the pricing. But that still dont include other expenses you listed. While some would argue dropbox to built their own DC. I still dont see it as a viable solution. Google, Apple, and May be Amazon dont need to make money from these Storage. And all 3 gets to leverage their existing infrastructure.

sz4kerto 12y ago

Well, almost (I paid 79 euros for 1TB + Office 2013). I don't really see how Dropbox is going to survive this price war as the others don't need to directly profit from these services (at least not in the near future). Dropbox cannot really cross-finance the storage costs as this is its main business.

fludlight 12y ago
Google, MS, and Apple can also afford to abandon or kill their cloud storage services. They'll do just that if said services don't generate a billion dollars a year in revenue fast enough. Dropbox, however, is a one trick pony. Expect them to stick around as a premium priced service. Until someone acquires them and ruins everything...
- danudey 12y ago
  Apple's strategy has never been to create products just for kicks and kill them off later. They spend a lot of time thinking about what they should be making, and focus just on that. I trust that iCloud, in some iteration, will be around for as long as people are buying iMacs and iPhones. Microsoft, miraculously, has been changing their spots lately, but I expect Windows Live Folders – I mean, Windows Live Skydive – or wait, just Skydive – er, I mean Onedrive – will be around in some iteration. What that will mean, though, is another question. They killed off Games for Windows Live pretty unceremoniously, and now Dark Souls, among other games, just straight up won't work properly. You can't save your game if you aren't connected to Games for Windows Live, which you can't do, retroactively crippling third party games. So for throwing my documents onto so that they still exist after I wipe my Windows machine for the Nth time, Skydive is great, but I don't yet trust them to change direction/focus and ruin any plans businesses have made around them. Google… well, they've cancelled enough stuff that I can't trust them with anything important related to business or lifestyle both.
cwyers 12y ago
I pay $9.99 a month for Office 365, which comes with a terabyte of OneDrive. Except that I can have five accounts on my Office 365 subscription, and EACH OF THEM gets a terabyte of OneDrive, plus each gets full access to Office 2013 and the Office webapps. It's a much better deal than Dropbox, even after this price drop.
- NicoJuicy 12y ago
  OneDrive for business is like $2.5 / user / month for 1 TB... Which is still a much better deal then Dropbox.

jonknee 12y ago

They de-dupe files and surely have negotiated with Amazon. Still seems like they should start opening their own data centers otherwise they never have a chance beating their own supplier at price.

danudey 12y ago
I wouldn't be surprised to see them buy up a company like Backblaze. It seems like a reasonable fit; Dropbox is already moving from document sync to 'all your stuff' sync. Adding straight-up backup would be a logical next step, and Backblaze has a huge amount of experience designing, building, and managing massive storage infrastructure. The biggest difference with Backblaze would seem to be that their service can easily assume minimal reads; besides the backup index, the vast majority of their disk usage is probably one-time writes, plus the occasional massive bulk read.

demircancelebi 12y ago

How did you come up with that price?

kjaspal 12y ago

As far as I understand Dropbox is still using Amazon S3. S3 according to their pricing calculator is roughly $26/month per TB (not including outbound traffic). I'm sure because of Dropbox's multi-PetaByte scale they have negotiated better prices with AWS. I wouldn't be surprised if they are paying $20/month per TB. The amount Amazon charges for data-transfer is quite crazy roughly $120/month per TB. If about 10% of data on dropbox is transferred out on a monthly basis than Dropbox total cost for storage is roughly $20 + 0.1 * $120 = $32/month per TB. Thus in order to break-even they are probably expecting the average paying user to use less than 30% of the 1 TB space. (In reality that is less since Dropbox has a free-tier they need to amortize along with marketing expenses, employee costs etc ..)

ksec 12y ago
I think that is the reason why they dont do other smaller plans. And adding data dedup along with some heavy discount to your equation they may break even with the pricing. But that still dont include other expenses you listed. While some would argue dropbox to built their own DC. I still dont see it as a viable solution. Google, Apple, and May be Amazon dont need to make money from these Storage. And all 3 gets to leverage their existing infrastructure.