Dropbox announced yesterday that they’re no longer offering unlimited storage.

While most personal account users have lived with storage limits for years, Dropbox has offered an unlimited plan on their Dropbox Advanced offering.

Alas, a few people spoiled it for the rest:

But over time, we found a growing number of customers were buying Advanced subscriptions not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage. In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of this behavior in the wake of other services making similar policy changes. We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers. Importantly, our policy for Advanced has always been to provide as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case.

Starting now, users who buy Dropbox Advanced seats get 5TB per user.

They’re also doing a limited-time grandfathering:

Customers using less than 35TB of storage per license—over 99% of Advanced customers—will be able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using at the time they’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage, for five years at no additional charge to their existing plan.

For the less than 1% of customers utilizing 35TB or more of storage per license, we’re committed to working with you. To make this transition easier, you’ll be able to continue utilizing your current storage amount at the time you’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for one year (up to 1,000TB total), at no additional charge to your existing plan.

And if you need more?  $10/month for 1TB or $8/month annual.

This development isn’t surprising.  Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have all abandoned unlimited storage for the same reasons.

Personally, I’ve been a Dropbox fan since before anyone else offered storage like this.  It’s always “just worked” for me on macOS, Windows, Linux (headless), and iOS.  Some nice scripting options, too.

I do think Dropbox in the long run is going to find competition increasingly tougher.  They’re competing with all the big tech companies and have a standalone-ish product.  There’s some collaborative features but no one buys Dropbox to run their business the same way they’re buy Google Suite.  Dropbox is profitable (earned $500m+ last year) but I have this nagging feeling I’m going to turn on my phone one day and find they’ve been acquired.

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raindog308

Dread Lord of LowEnd Content at LowEndBox

I'm raindog308, techno polymath and long-time LowEndTalk community Administrator. My technical interests include all things Unix, perl, python, golang, shell scripting, vintage operating systems such as MVS, and relational database systems such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

I also enjoy using LEBs! I have an empire of little guys for VPNs, larger guys for apps, and big guys for databases and storage. When I'm not in front a screen I'm into German Shepherd dogs, quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop roleplaying games, and forest hiking.

I enjoy writing technical articles here on LowEndBox to help people get more out of their systems. You can find me on LowEndTalk @raindog308

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