The company is nowhere near failing. It's just not necessary to be as big as it is.
Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com.
I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer.
Unfortunately, it's inevitable, since presenting a regular file explorer looks like they're competing in the commodity file syncing / backup space, not the higher-value enterprise collaboration space. They're trying not to be a "feature" as Steve Jobs called them.
Enterprise collaboration is going to use what integrates with their email - that's going to be OneDrive or Google Drive. The commodity syncing space was where DropBox shined, and it feels weird taking a step back from that.
I'm a paying customer and I just realised that I'd not been using my Dropbox on my rebuilt laptop for >6months. I gave up with the crappy view. That's pretty bad if I only just noticed!
I'm glad I'm not the only one. And once I close that window with Cmd+Q, I have a mild panic attack that I closed the actual service that was in the middle of a sync and may have lost some data.
[I'm being polite :)] I've been unable to find anything to make an informed opinion on what they mean by end-to-end encryption, which is prominently mentioned on the home page etc.
[I'm not being polite. #BeingThatGuy :)] My best guess is that they're using their own definition of end-to-end encryption. i.e., SSL for transit + encryption at rest = "end-to-end encryption". Whatever.
For me the main reason I'm not a Dropbox customer is their rigid pricing structure, £7.99 a month for 1TB is good value for people who use 1TB, but I only need like 10% of that so would be wasting money
I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit
I've stuck with Google drive for the 100gb plan at £1.99 which suits my needs, but would move to Dropbox in a heartbeat if they offered a similar tier
I can get Office 365 Family (6 people), each one getting 1TB, plus 60 mins of skype per month each, plus word, excel, PowerPoint, online and desktop. Dropbox's Family plan, includes only 2TB of storage and basically nothing more (I know about paper but who uses it?). Office365 costs 50 euros per year. Dropbox 200 euros per year! Four times as expensive, and much less features. They are crazy expensive.
In 2015/16/17 there was also the silly 5-seat minimum for businesses. I purchased a $150/yr plan only to be suddenly billed $750 (in the fine print, you were committing to 5 seats minimum, whether the seats were assigned or not.) If you checked your credit card bill more than 30 days out, thats it, no refund.
> I'm guessing they bank on a small % of "whale" consumers using all their allowance and everyone else being way under the limit
For a £7.99/month plan, the cost of goods sold (COGS) on the actual storage and bandwidth is probably about 33% of that -- and that's based on average usage.
Here's a longer explanation with citations that I wrote in 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465883#16470633. I haven't looked at their annual reports since then, but the COGS could have easily dropped by 50% in that time, so it might be way less than 33%.
Just based on that 2018 data, the other £5 or so is customer acquisition cost, software development, support, administration, and everything else.
The COGS is a small enough part of the price that, even if they could remove a lot of it (by reducing usage and/or the cap), the absolute cost reduction might be 10% or 20% of the current price.
This is true for the smaller plans of almost all SaaS. The vendor's variable COGS are not what you're paying for. (Exception: cloud services with entirely usage-based pricing and no monthly minimum, like S3. Those are rare.)
They're not likely to add smaller packages though, since they KNOW 99% of their customers will never go up that high. It's a bit like gmail; they offered 1 GB at the time (if I recall correctly?) which was a ridiculous amount that in practice, 99% of people would NEVER reach. But it was great PR. Mind you, gmail is "free".
If Dropbox were to offer a 500GB package for half price, 99% of their customers that found out about it would switch to that. What's worse, they would likely open themselves up to a class action suit for people who feel like they overpaid for years.
Introducing a cheaper, lower capacity subscription now would be suicide for the company.
> they would likely open themselves up to a class action suit for people who feel like they overpaid for years.
That's overly dramatic. Companies cut prices every day.
It is however true that Dropbox cannot compete on price with the likes of MS, Google, and Apple. They can only compete on experience and features, and few people are impressed by their evolution in those areas.
Do we really need a monstruous (and monstruously slow) html view when right-clicking on the systray icon? Do we really need online file-viewers that, most of the times, seem meant to stop you from getting at the actual file?
Dropbox was great when it did one thing flawlessly and got out of your way, while allowing for hackability and true cross-platform support. When they were doing fun things like the easter-egg-hunts and challenges to get extra space. Now they often feel like Yet Another SV App shouting "LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! I CAN DO THIS AND THAT AND YOU DON'T NEED ANYTHING ELSE IN YOUR LIFE! LET ME INGEST ALL YOUR DATA AND LOCK YOU IN FOREVER!". I still have an account mostly because I have a free grandfathered account, but the minute they turn it off (and inevitably they will, since they are now a Serious Company with Serious Strategies and Serious Spreadsheets) I'll just check out.
Real hard to make a business with a $2 a month fee. When credit card fees in the US, the bank is eating like 50 cents of it. I think 7-8 bucks/pounds is about the minimum price for many apps to bother with it. Below that rather just have a limited “free” tier.
Charge annually? I use Zoho for email because of their $12/year/user lite usage plan. There's no way I'd pay for MS365 or Google Workplace given my usage. I also have an MXRoute account, historio.us, etc. where the recurring theme is they cost $20/year or less.
That minimum fee has recently increased. Like 1-2 months ago. You are not going to negotiate that down with VISA/MC. Talk to a bar/restaurant worker, who gets to see the transaction fees.
I own an MSP and we have wide latitude to set rates with our customers. The numbers that were in the example ($.50 plus on a $2 transaction) are on the high side of ridiculous, especially for card present. And yes, the base costs vary by industry so your milage may vary.
Domains are really close to 0 support. Can you email support questions when Dropbox starts acting weird? For $10-$20 a year, one support ticket makes the customer unprofitable for the entire year.
Real thin margins, seems gross to try and build a business on the $1-$2 a month thing. I wouldn’t.
Works for a Titans like apple and google because they are making money in other ways..
> Dropbox still has the best sync by far than any other system
This is a common dev thought. But almost no company in the world is going to care about that. You can onboard some consumer with that point but I hope they don't actually try to sign companies using that.
Of course it doesn't matter if it's just used for syncing some office files but Dropbox is common in creative fields like video production and visual effects where sync performance is a real selling point.
I can't talk about GDrive or iCloud. However, window's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than dropbox IMO.
It actually surprised me how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just worked out of the box, the only thing I had to do was provide my windows credentials (benefits of that sort of integration).
That being said, I've not tried to access those same files from my phone. Maybe that's worse. Dropbox does a really good job of syncing well across platforms.
Do you mean Onedrive? It's not built-in but installed by default on Windows. It's still not as good as Dropbox. For example it only recently added differential syncing (for non-office files)[1] while Dropbox puts much more effort into syncing tech [2].
Most people probably won't notice the difference because the alternatives are good enough now. But if you have millions of files in deep folders, constant changes from multiple devices, or need instant syncing, then Dropbox is still worth the premium for the performance.
> how seamless it worked on my new laptop. Everything just worked out of the box.
All the other sync / backup apps also work that way after installation.
I actually dislike Onedrive web interface look compared to the top competitors. Photo view often appears buggy when scrolling down (outlook.com file view also has problems). Sharing folders/files as a public link gives full access by default.
Both web Outlook and Onedrive do not seem to have received much updates in the past few years.
Unfortunately there are a lot of filenames it can't handle, and can't always explain. It supports only Windows filenames, while I use my Mac as a unix machine and create all sorts of filenames.
> window's cloud storage is REALLY good. Far better than dropbox IMO.
That's "thanks" to Dropbox though. Microsoft's "Live" features used to be terrible. It took a competitor to show them how it's done and force them to step up their game.
Dropbox still has the best sync technology by far, however they failed to really capitalize on a single market. The consumer side cares more about value and it's hard to compete with Microsoft/Apple/Google while the business side is already well-served by Box.com.
I still think there's a good opportunity if they can build on storage to create applications like Asana/Airtable/Notion/Slack but that seems to have failed with the Paper experiment and the strange "dropbox" app window that opens instead of a file explorer.