from Hacker News

Dropbox Professional

by psychotik on 10/17/17, 4:55 PM with 121 comments

• by brchr on 10/17/17, 5:46 PM

  According to the new plans page [1], "shared link controls" for things like passwords and expiration dates will now no longer be available on the Plus plans like they have been for the last 5+ years? Am I reading this correctly? If so, that is a deeply unsatisfying regression buried in this announcement.

  [1]: https://www.dropbox.com/plans

• by kayoone on 10/17/17, 5:59 PM

  I have a hard time with Dropbox' pricing. I was a pro user once, but discontinued it because i didn't actually need that much storage, i would have been fine with 100GB for 40 EUR or something.

  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.

• by dabernathy89 on 10/17/17, 7:22 PM

  If anyone from Dropbox is following along in this thread, can you explain why your most requested feature has been ignored for years?

  https://www.dropboxforum.com/t5/Dropbox/Ignore-folder-withou...

• by jaytaylor on 10/17/17, 7:03 PM

  Why is Dropbox straying so far from its core mission and competency?

  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.

• by brightball on 10/17/17, 5:38 PM

  I might sign up for this just for Smart sync.

  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.

• by sidcool on 10/17/17, 5:24 PM

  I would love to see Dropbox get into the Productivity market. Google and Microsoft gives everything an enterprise would need, Storage, Sync, Document collaboration, Online word, sheets etc., email etc.

  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.

• by danieldk on 10/17/17, 5:41 PM

  So they created a new Pro plan:

  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.

• by marcusjt on 10/17/17, 7:37 PM

  Dropbox's "Smart Sync" sounds a lot like Google's "Drive File Stream" - https://gsuite.google.com/campaigns/index__drive-fs-eap.html

• by digitalengineer on 10/17/17, 5:24 PM

  A showcase portfolio? Is that still a problem in need of fixing? I can't imagine myself using this and I've been using dropbox for ages and I work for myself in the creative industry.

• by post_break on 10/17/17, 8:08 PM

  If you need to, here is how you cancel your dropbox account... they don't make it easy to find. www.dropbox.com/downgrade

• by bpicolo on 10/17/17, 5:21 PM

  So they're trying to compete with Behance? That actually kinda sorta explains the recent, somewhat odd redesign. Not sure how they'll manage to take market from Behance though.

• by JohnBooty on 10/17/17, 7:13 PM

  I'd pay money for a replacement for their old "Public" folder that gives me:

  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.

• by bad_user on 10/18/17, 6:03 AM

  I'm a long time Dropbox user, paying €14 per month (including the extended version history and taxes).

  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.

• by StanAngeloff on 10/17/17, 7:49 PM

  I wonder if axing public folders was partially done because of the, at the time, upcoming Dropbox Professional? If you could share an interactive HTML mockup as part of the free service, there is little incentive to pay extra for a professional service.

• by ProfessorLayton on 10/17/17, 6:54 PM

  Dropbox has been dropping out of favor for me. Their app now has non-notifications on my system menu (Check out this new feature!), and it drains my laptop's battery when there's lots of syncing going on. I also I didn't like how they handled the Accessibility controls fiasco.

  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.

• by zapt02 on 10/17/17, 8:27 PM

  As a paying Dropbox subscriber for many years, all I see is Dropbox removing features (like public folders) or making existing features worse (current situation of search is insanely bad). I for one am looking at alternatives now.

• by dhruvio on 10/17/17, 7:18 PM

  IMHO, IPFS paired with GPG is the best, open source solution out there.

• by post_break on 10/17/17, 7:57 PM

  More features leaving Dropbox paid plans. I don't get it. Public folder, the photos thing, now shared link controls are gone. I'm done with dropbox.

• by d--b on 10/17/17, 6:32 PM

  It's not that surprising that Dropbox is moving into this space. They kind of lost the enterprise battle, and are still very popular among arty people who need to share large files easily (and without caring much about security).

  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...

• by sigsergv on 10/18/17, 3:29 AM

  I've switched to resilio sync already. It works perfectly even on rapidly changing files.

• by dordoka on 10/17/17, 8:53 PM

  Apparently they now have problems too. Getting HTTP 500 errors everywhere...

• by wonder_bread on 10/17/17, 5:36 PM

  So a Squarespace/Wix replacement?

• by joshuamcginnis on 10/17/17, 7:02 PM

  Aside from iCloud, are there any other comparable alternatives to Dropbox?

• by tedmiston on 10/17/17, 7:03 PM

  Tl;dr - It looks like a rebranding to charge more for single creative pro users that previously would have gotten nearly the same benefits of the personal plan for, I think, half the price. They are injecting a tier in between the normal plan and the teams / business plan.

  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.