Dropbox limits Advanced plan storage after unlimited policy backfires
Dropbox announced plans to change the storage policy of its Dropbox Advanced plan after some customers started to abuse of the unlimited storage offer.
Dropbox Advanced is a plan designed for businesses according to Dropbox. The main idea behind offering unlimited storage from the get-go was that organizations had enough storage space available at any time and not worry about scaling storage.
Dropbox claims that it was aware that there would be "some level of uneven usage" as businesses had different storage requirements.
The company did notice, however, that "a growing number of customers" were purchasing Advanced plan subscriptions for other purposes. Dropbox mentions crypto and Chia mining, storage reselling or multiple users "pooling storage for personal use cases".
When other services started to impose restrictions on storage, Dropbox saw a surge in sign-ups for Dropbox Advanced from users that were not businesses. Many of these customers would consume more storage, sometimes thousands of times more storage, than regular business customers.
This put a strain on the entire Advanced plan and could affect legitimate use cases, if not corrected. The decision was made to sunset the unlimited storage policy and switch to a metered model instead.
New Dropbox Advanced customers gain 15 terabytes of storage space if at least three active licenses are purchased. Additional licenses will add 5 terabyte of storage to the shared pool according to Dropbox. Each Dropbox Advanced user costs $18 per month.
Existing customers who use less than 35 terabytes of date, more than 99% of all customers fall into the group according to Dropbox, keep the total amount of storage plus an addition 5 terabyte for five years at no additional charge to the existing plan.
The remaining existing customers, those that use more than 35 terabytes of data, may continue to use the storage plus an additional 5 terabytes of data for one year. The maximum storage amount is 1000 terabytes according to Dropbox. Dropbox plans to contact these customers to discuss options in the coming weeks.
New and existing customers may purchase 1 terabyte of storage for $10 per month or $8 per month when paid annually in the near future.
Existing customers are migrated on November 1, 2023 to the new storage policy. Dropbox plans to notify all customers "at least 30 days prior to" the planned migration date.
Dropbox is not the only company that ran into issues after offering unlimited storage. In 2015, Microsoft announced storage plan downgrades for nearly every customer after, including paying Office 365 Home, Personal and University customers who previously had unlimited storage. Microsoft revealed that some customers were uploading more than 14000 times more than the average user.
Rapidshare, a once popular file hosting service, dropped unlimited storage plans in 2013. The service is no longer available.
Amazon ended its unlimited storage plan for Amazon Drive in 2018. Amazon Drive is being shut down at the end of 2023.
Google, another Internet juggernaut, announced in 2020 that it would end free unlimited Google Photos storage in 2021.
Now You: do you use online storage actively? Which service do you recommend, and why?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.