Dropbox Professional(blogs.dropbox.com) |
Dropbox Professional(blogs.dropbox.com) |
I see how Dropbox is trying to diversify their prices based on features. But honestly, they should try to compete harder with providers like Apple and Google by providing different storage tiers. Apple has 2TB for the same $9.99/mo Dropbox provides 1TB. At this point Dropbox has me mostly because of inertia and their reliability.
I pay 99 per year for Office365 which gives me the full office suite for 5 people who can each install everything on 5 devices + 1TB OneDrive. Of course OneDrive is no Dropbox, but it does it's job and holds the bulk of my data while i use Dropbox just for sharing.
Given that gdrive and most equivalent offers don't support Linux client, I ended up going with pCloud, and have been really happy so far.
Since there are probably more people who are paying for quality/reliability than paying "per gigabytes," they would badly hurt their business by offering a plan that cheap.
Since OneDrive's lower quality product satisfies you, you don't need what makes Dropbox good, and it doesn't make sense for them to pursue you by introducing commodity pricing.
I have extra storage with google for my photos but I keep my dropbox account for keeping important stuff on every device. In fact I find Dropbox works better on my Android devices than google drive.
https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Ignore-folder-withou...
Another many-page thread from 2014.
It's a big problem everywhere, but especially in business settings where there's often tons of data and anyone adding a new folder to Dropbox ends up syncing that new folder to everyone, whether they want anything to do with it or not.
For personal use it sucks when you only want to sync a few folders to e.g. a PC with a small hard drive, or if you've got a data cap.
The new "online only" option is nice but "don't auto-sync new folders" is a seemingly simple option that's been missing for years. OneDrive has it.[1]
[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Stop-auto-inheriting...
[2] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Choose-which-OneDri... "If you're choosing folders on two computers and you create a new folder on computer A that you want to sync to computer B, you'll need to go to computer B and select the new folder there."
Edit
It seems like they're bloating up the product with features that have little relation to the core mission of providing secure storage, access, and sharing for files.
As a user and investor, I'd rather see:
- Better, more competitive pricing.
Or if that's not an option, at the very least..
- Stick to relevant technological innovation. For example, wouldn't it be cool if intelligent caching and network awareness would let you turn a 1TB drive into a 5TB drive? That would be a much more compelling story.
Given the stiff competition in the space, all this holds doubly true imho.
Edit: there's some cool tech around this you can read about here: https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-pro...
Dropbox can either add features or slash prices.
A great next step here would be to venture into the online document signing space (Ecosign, RightSignature, etc).
You’ve got probably 70% of what you need for it here already with Showcase.
EDIT: Tried to sign up but the linux client doesn't support Smart Sync yet. Support people tell me it's pending.
Dropbox so far is a brilliant file sync and storage service. Dropbox Paper may be a start, but if they want to stay relevant, productivity is something they will have to do.
Google drive in comparison has a 100G plan for around $20/year, which is enough for most people. Too bad Google has no delta sync.
I still think Dropbox has the best sync engine in this space but I feel the pricing/features is no longer competitive.
They have a challenge in that there are so many (dozens, maybe hundreds) of apps they need so they act like more of a platform for other apps.
Doing an office suite requires a lot of development time.
I just did the math and now thinking I should pay for Dropbox, instead of S3.
https://www.dropbox.com/plans/individual?trigger=nr
Recently, they renamed the old Pro plan to Plus. This sucks quite a bit for long-time users, since they are only adding new features (smart sync, full content search) to the new Pro plan.
Like over provisioning in the VPS space... maybe, I don't know for sure, just throwing this out there food for thought.
I have a bunch of friends in the creative space who use dropbox exclusively to share their work. It's a portfolio for them that's easier to update and control what the prospective client sees. Some of them also have a website portfolio (typically a squarespace setup) but they take so much time to build and maintain with fresh work that they end up sending both a link to the website and dropbox for the latest work.
I totally see why Dropbox is doing this, I just wonder if there are enough creatives who use it this way to make them any substantial gains or if the cool kids convinced them this was the most important thing to do.
1. A directory on my drive that's automatically synced to a public folder on a web server
2. The convenience of Dropbox's Finder/Explorer integration (right-click to copy link)
First one is pretty trivial with a cron job (or equivalent) and some rsync-fu. Second one, not sure. That's basically the convenience factor I'd pay a few bucks a month for. That and never having to check if the cron job's running. I want brain-dead simple. Anybody know of something that does this?
Their "link to your file(s) on Dropbox.com, embedded in a fancy web interface" feature(s) seems pretty useful honestly. Especially the history of who viewed the file -- that's a real differentiating feature. Different use case though.
Edit: I'm not sure why this is being downvoted.
If you just want to right click to get a shared link...Dropbbox has always supported that. If you don't like the ugly chrome Dropbox puts around your content, append "?raw=1" to the links Dropbox returns.
If I upgrade to Pro to try it out and then downgrade to Plus, I'll probably lose the "shared link controls" feature. To take a feature out of a current plan in order to convince people to jump on your new plan — that's a pretty shitty thing to do for any company.
Also €14 is already above the threshold that I'm willing to pay as a professional and yes, I rely on Dropbox to keep my data safe and for sharing stuff with others. But I've been doing it in the hope that Dropbox will include features that I need and I've been glad to support them.
Features like online full-text indexing are missing from Plus and I need that, because I'm searching for documents on my mobile phone too. And I've been putting up with it hoping that it will eventually be included.
And now they want me to pay €20 for that, not including the extended versioning? I'm also a FastMail user, paying around €4 for email. So that would be a €24 per month for file storage, plus email, forgoing the extended version history, going out of my own pocket.
Well, Google's GSuite for Business is €9.52 (including taxes), which includes email and unlimited storage (they say 1TB for under 5 users, but truth is they aren't capping your account until you abuse it). And on last year's Black Friday I saw Office 365 Family offers for €4 / month.
Now I understand that Dropbox has the best sync engine. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now — and I might try the Pro plan this month. But if that Smart Sync feature doesn't do wonders for me, I'm switching, sorry.
Also Smart Sync is not available for Linux. Again, I've been putting up with their big price because I care about Linux. Not seeing the Linux client evolving however makes me wonder about their long term support and seriously, if they ever drop Linux support, I'll drop them like a hot potato.
And these days you can use a Dropbox API app to get something just as good and in some ways better than the public folder. Check out https://www.site44.com/ It has no problem linking to free Dropbox accounts. (though it is a paid service...)
I bought my parents a subscription to iCloud and whats really great about the product is that they don't even know they have it, they just know their iPhones and Macbook aren't nagging them about space anymore (They're not techies).
So far iCloud has been working really smoothly for them and I'm considering the switch.
I prepay my $36/year in iCloud storage for all of our synced family photos by purchasing a gift card each year and then applying it to my iTunes account (instead of dinging my CC $3/month, which is just annoying).
Cheaper, you can have 5seat office license and family plan.
Disclaimer: no decent linux client but macos is more less okeish.
In a way it's a bit like Apple's move to cater to creative people after losing the enterprise to Microsoft.
They have some way to go though, cause the brand is not really there yet...
What is this based on? Not saying you're wrong, just looking for some evidence because that seems like a big claim.
I don't see that feature, but they're more likely to be able to than squarespace/wix.
It’s $5/mo per head, 1TB of storage, Mac and PC clients. It is rough around the edges (nomobile ecosystem, for example) but it seems to be more than adequate for syncing and some sharing.
Selective sync isn't actually new despite the marketing spin that now it's available on a per file level. Nor are expiring and protected links. The webpage builder tool is new.
Edit: Surprised to see someone downvoted this. Look at Dropbox's feature page… this stuff already exists.
Not me. I'd pay a little more for Smart Sync, but not double the price. If they went to $129 on Plus and included that feature, I'd upgrade immediately.
If anything, this thread has me looking at OneDrive because I didn't realize $99 a year got you Office + 1TB of storage. I said upthread I didn't intend to switch, but now I'm really thinking.
On the other hand OneDrive's client is shitty and until last month they weren't doing file versioning either. So it's just a cheap knockoff and you get what you pay for.
Microsoft Office being included is cool, but then me and my colleagues are collaborating with Google Docs, which is way better than anything else when multiple people are editing the same files. For presentations I'm using Apple's Keynote, which is the best I've seen thus far. And there's always LibreOffice for those docs I receive.
What I use OneDrive for are backups with https://www.arqbackup.com — if I can find good offers this year, I might renew and keep my backup system, otherwise no.
Setting up on new computer has been painful since full sync takes couple of days (lots of small files). With smart it would be actually possible to travel with empty disk and sync needed files on destination.
What about Selective Sync which has been there for years?
I'm not, it doesn't cost them hardly anything extra and yet I have to pay twice as much a month just so I reclaim some HD space?
But yea, it certainly sucks to have to remove functionality, especially from such long time and loyal users. I just want to make the argument that this wasn't done to somehow trick people into upgrading their plans, but with the goal of creating a better product (which sometimes means a simpler product).
edit: For a timeline breakdown...accounts created after late 2012 stopped getting public folders. Public folders for legacy users kept working until March of this year. That's ~4.5 years of support for a feature only accessible to legacy accounts. They certainly did not foresee Dropbox Professional when they made the decision to stop creating more public folders. https://www.dropbox.com/help/files-folders/public-folder
(also note that selective sync != smart sync)
That said I'm pretty happy with Dropbox and not going to switch. I'd love Smart Sync, though, but not at 2x the price I'm paying for Plus right now. $99 a year is great, $199 not so much.
What makes you think it's going to be surprise-discontinued?
Right now Microsoft seems really high on cloud, particularly as a means to make Office a subscription product (which helps with legacy support, as in the long run, there are no legacy versions to support in this model). From that respect, I don't think OneDrive is at any risk of ceasing to be a product, but I do think they might yo-yo the storage quotas and things like that. Didn't they do that with SkyDrive a while back?
I'd certainly rate their risk lower than Google, which does have a history of abandoning things that people really like.
Dropbox and Apple are lowest risk for me, but for two different reasons. For Dropbox, it is their product, and they seem to make money. For Apple, it's baked into their user experience, and they tend to focus on that - rather than cut costs and compete on price, they'll make it more expensive if they need to, but it'll probably continue to work well.
That said, it probably won't happen overnight and it's not that difficult to migrate from OneDrive to Google Drive or such. Lock-in is low.
Dropbox isn't competing on storage alone anymore. It wants to release productivity tools and start getting more into the Business space (which I can't fault, biz is where the volume and margins are at). But for storage alone? Sync fast, don't lose my files, and you can have my money.
I won't dare say iCloud/OneDrive/Dropbox are a commodity...yet. Storage is a commodity (S3, Backblaze, Azure, GCP, etc), and the consumer-friendly layer on top will eventually commoditize (and you'll be able to migrate your entire "drive" between providers super quick). The treadmill only speeds up.
Edit: For me, after Apple actually decided to integrate iCloud into macOS, I felt more secure about it staying, but before that it definitely felt like a pet project that might be abandoned. I still don't fully trust it with my documents, but since I have an iPhone, I have well over 15GB of photos and videos uploaded that I'd like to see stay for a while. :)
Groove Music is an even more recent example. Yes, the service is going away, and certain parts of the deprecation might be annoying (you have to download all purchased music before the end of the year, for instance) but all accounts can be migrated to Spotify, a previous competitor of the service. It's not like we left people completely stranded without any options.
It is not in the same league as Dropbox.
Also, it's likely that your past experience is with the old OneDrive for Business client. Last year the normal OneDrive client learned to sync OneDrive for Business data, and reliability and performance improved quite a bit.
(I worked on OneDrive until last summer, but I don't currently work at Microsoft.)