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Dear Dropbox I want to give you money, but my way?
I love dropbox. But I don't think 50gbytes is with $10/month so I stay a free member. Mostly so I don't actually lose anything if I decided to cancel later.
You see there's a psychological barrier to me opting in. How about a one time payment plan? Compete with portable drives with a one time fee and soft guarantee of reliable online storage. I don't want to have to keep paying $10/month, but a one time $X dollar fee would flip the switch in
my head to opt in.
Just a heads up.
- dotcoma 17y agoeven better: the first ones to chip in pay less, and then other people will have to fork out more, as they will be able to share documents with a larger user base.
- chaosprophet 17y agoPerhaps you should write directly to dropbox???
- messel 17y agoIf it was just me that liked the concept there's little reason for them to consider implementing it.
- SwellJoe 17y agoThey have millions of users...if it's something a lot of people want, they will have heard about it from many people already.
- messel 17y agoThat's a fair assumption. I hadn't seen it anywhere, could be a bad suggestion on my part? I wonder how many paying users they have so far though, that's the part I'd care about as a startup. Different pricing models can open up the doors top bigger conversion rates though. They are probably considering different levels.
- yrashk 17y agoI'd better pay for some business features, not just mere space
- dualogy 17y agoIf you're so understanding of your own psychology, couldn't you just tell your brain the "fixed" sum of say 10x12 or 10x20 and be done with your decision-making?... ;)
- messel 17y agoI don't know what the X is. If I use dropbox for say 10 years, then the cost is pretty large and I'd likely never opt in.
- SwellJoe 17y agoOne-time fees are somewhat risky for new companies, though they also have some appeal. The risks are that Dropbox probably does not yet actually know with certainty what it costs to store and backup your data for a long period of time. We all know it gets cheaper per GB, over time, for raw storage but there are other costs, as well, and with bandwidth getting cheaper, it may be that the use cases for Dropbox expand to include things that are more demanding or expensive for them to provide. There's also the concern (an ethical one) that perhaps Dropbox may not be a sustainable business model, and might be forced to shut down in a year, leaving a bunch of customers (rightly) feeling screwed. That said, the benefits for a vendor in providing a one-time fee are pretty huge. After three years in business we just queitly introduced our first lifetime license type a couple of months ago, and it's been a nice bump to our short-term revenue; about 20% for the first two months it has existed. And, that money is probably more valuable to us today than it will be in four years (which is when the "lifetime" option begins paying the customer back for the higher initial price). So, if the Dropbox guys were asking my advice, I'd say it's probably wise to add a lifetime pricing option. But only once you have enough data to know you can afford to offer it profitably, and you have reasonable expectations about how much it will cost to continue offering the service in the future. Money is worth more to startups today than it will be next year, so get the most money you can up front.
- messel 17y agoThanks Joe, that makes perfect sense and would be a great option for me as a buyer. Every purchase I make there's a risk of failure over time. There's a perception of paying forever that's hard for me to get past with the current pricing scheme. I get web hosting cheaper (for multiple sites), and Dropbox feels more limited at this point.