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Ask HN: Am I the only one who thinks Dropbox pricing is baffling?

by hvass on 3/15/18, 12:16 PM with 7 comments

• by blakdawg on 3/15/18, 11:25 PM

  I wouldn’t be shocked if lower-revenue customers turn out to be a disproportionate demand on support/customer service. Not every potential customer is a good fit from a vendors perspective.

  My impression is that they’ve got the free plan for people with minimal usage or who just want to kick the tires - beyond that, if their service isn’t worth $100/yr to you, they don’t want to think about you or support you.

• by obscura on 3/18/18, 3:43 PM

  If you look at just the space you're using, then sure, Dropbox is expensive. But if you look at the extra services on top the of the fundamental sync/store service, perhaps it isn't. Determining the value is subjective - it depends on what you want from the service, how many of its features you actually use, etc.

  If you've come to rely on the extra services and/or have an extensive network of friends, colleagues, etc. who you interact with via Dropbox, you'll probably view the service as being more valuable that just the amount of storage space offered.

  In addition, one of the things that Dropbox banks on is people under-utilising the space on offer, which enhances the perception of it being good value, especially if you're a long-time user - the amount of space available to you has been increased over time (instead of the price being decreased). It also lessens their costs, as they only have to cater for the amount of space actually used, not what could be used.

  Fundamentally, offering cheaper options would chew into their revenues, as many people who are happy to pay for more than what they use would jump to those options.

  You might like to read the first and second responses here for more on this: https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Dropbox-move-to-a-single-Pro-p...

• by xstartup on 3/16/18, 11:39 AM

  People said, our plans were expensive. We increased it by 10x.

  Result - Much higher revenue, sales team/customer service is happy as customers are now less demanding. The engineering team is happy as they get more budget to play with.

• by hitsurume on 3/15/18, 6:00 PM

  I don't see this as a Dropbox problem, you may not be the end user they have in mind. You have the freedom to use any cloud provider you want, so you should definitely switch if you find you get better value else where.

  To backup dropbox, they are fairly easy to use, can be installed on multiple OS's / devices, etc etc. But hey, if you have all Apple products, then you save $$ by just sticking with them right?

• by askafriend on 3/16/18, 1:39 AM

  The Dropbox interface is worth the extra cost to me, even if the sync service is effectively similar to other competitors.

  I imagine, others feel the same. I've also never had an issue with Dropbox so I appreciate the known reliability.

  For people for whom the above things aren't worth the extra cost, I can easily see why alternatives look far more attractive.

• by edimaudo on 3/15/18, 12:29 PM

  They may be aiming for enterprise clients.