Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox Is in Talks with Advisers for Possible 2017 IPO

bloomberg.com

167 pointssurement174 comments

Founded in 2007. I think its fair to say that dropbox is one of the more successful starups around. So when you join a startup, I think its reasonable to ask them for either:

- long option exercise periods after they leave the company, like the 10 years that has been thrown around before.

- or written authorization to sell vested options on a secondary market at the market price

- or plan to stay with the company for 10+ years, remembering that you probably can't sell for the first 6 months of going public.

Because ifyou join a startup where some of your comp is in the form of options, this is what you are signing up for.

Or you could just exercise your options within the 90-day window. Me personally I'd much rather lose a fixed sum of money, then realize I missed out on being a millionaire.

Then you might owe an absurd amount of money to the tax man. As far as the IRS is concerned, you need to pay the AMT on the difference between the price per share of Dropbox at exercise time, and your strike price. If you joined before Dropbox went through a couple rounds of funding, this tax bill could easily be in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars. You need to get that money from somewhere, but you can't sell on the secondary market, so what do you do?

Yep, you're basically rolling the dice.

It gets worse if you're at a unicorn startup that doesn't exit well, because then you may have paid thousands in taxes on stock that is essentially worth pennies:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/27/technology/when-a-unicorn-...

Any tax paid only for exercising options is AMT. It is refundable as AMT credits in future tax years where your conventional tax liability is less than your AMT liability. It's still bad news, and an unfortunate result for the fairly well off "little guy" in this story, but it's not as bad as it was in the dotcom bust in an era before the AMT credit existed.

Yep this matches my experience with unicorn stock options. It was a pain to come up with the exercise price & AMT upfront in the first place but the AMT was refunded in full the next year.

Unless you do an 83b election.

Can you do that for ISO?

yes, possible to early exercise an ISO and then elect 83(b).

however, if you definitely want to early exercise, NSO is preferable since an NSO has more favorable tax treatment wrt to timing: for NSO, long-term capital gain treatment starts one year after exercise, whereas for an ISO you need to wait both one year after exercise AND two years after the option grant date.

so, specifically: if you early exercise an ISO on the day it is granted, you have to wait 2 years for LTCG treatment vs. with an NSO, you only have to wait one year after you exercise, even if it's on the date of grant.

I'm aware. I've already paid taxes on options that are underwater. I just use my paycheck to purchase the options.

Giving a pile of money to the company you just decided to leave and another pile of money to the IRS gets old after a couple of times. How many lotto tickets do you buy every week?

I believe the places I work are going to be successful, otherwise I wouldn't work there. Yes there's a lot of luck involved, but it's not just picking numbers at random.

What about when you join a company that is promising, but then starts going downhill and you want to leave. That's the time you'll need to write the check, and it's hard to feel good gambling on a company you are leaving

If you've been there for 10 years, then the taxes on those options will murder you if you choose to exercise now. I think ideally, that you incrementally exercise over the period of time of your stay. Bigger risk since you won't be sure of the future of the company as you do now but the difference in the strike price and the value that you exercise would be smaller which would hopefully mean less tax. I think the idea is to exercise your options when the current value of the stock is not too far from the strike price granted.*

* I am not a tax adviser.

Wouldn't exercising your options be a taxable event? Without a way to liquidate them you are stuck with a big tax bill and still potentially worthless share.

The tax liabilities on the 'paper gain' could easily go into the six figures. Not sure if many people would be able to do that, let alone want to.

Why exactly would you prefer that over a longer exercise window? What are the odds that the startup you joined 2 years in will successfully exit (even 8 years later in the case of Dropbox)?

Just have money bro! So obvious!

The question I wonder is this:

Of the first 10 non-founding engineers—i.e. those who almost certainly took a salary cut in exchange for equity—how many will be able to retire off of an upcoming multi-billion dollar IPO?

Retirement is a very hazy metric, so let's say How many have at least 1/3 of a 1% stake? Remember these are the people were with the company at its most fragile time and this is a massive success.

I have no insider information, but based on what I know of other YC companies thus far, I'd say that the founders almost certainly have double digit percentages and that less than half of the first 10 engineering hires have even a third of one percent.

On a related note, I wish Andrew Mason a roaring success with his post-Groupon endeavors.

> One of Dropbox’s closest competitors, Box Inc., went public last year at a $1.7 billion valuation -- 29 percent below the value it fetched in a private funding round six months earlier. Box shares traded at $12.88 at 12:36 p.m. in New York, below its $14-a-share IPO price.

Will Dropbox valuation be affected by BOX's performance in the last few years?

I'm obligated to mention Box's S-1 filing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9407229.

I don't know whether Dropbox is profitable, but Box always seemed like it was abysmally managed from a financial standpoint.

That is fairly standard language. Expect Dropbox's S-1 filing to contain similar warnings about profitability and discussions about investment in various parts of the company

The article states that Dropbox is not profitable. However, they are "free cash flow positive", so, take that for what it's worth...

I'm not sure how Box has managed to burn so much cash the past few years, or how they manage to still lose money with revenues of 300m. Post-IPO one would think there might be an incentive to be profitable, particularly when large customer risk assessment includes the financial health of the provider.

They had neither the first-mover advantage (Dropbox), nor massive cash reserves to offer storage at a loss just to compete with Dropbox (Google, Microsoft). They flew out to every single conference about everything to promote Box to people who kept asking, "oh, so you're like Dropbox?"; they bought a bunch of S3 but then they started building their own backend [1], and literally paid people to make 'apps' for their 'platform' [2].

They were always going to have to burn a ton of cash to catch up and it's actually kind of remarkable that they're still around.

[1] https://gigaom.com/2013/06/20/why-cloud-storage-startup-box-...

[2] https://gigaom.com/2013/06/06/box-to-pay-mobile-app-develope...

Box.net was available before Dropbox.

Yes, Box was founded in 2005 [1] and launched in 2006 [2], while Dropbox was founded two years later in 2007 [3], and launched in 2008 [4]. But it's undisputed that Dropbox achieved name recognition and popularity before Box did. Therefore, despite dating chronologically later, Dropbox was able to execute better and earlier than Box, and claiming first-mover advantage.

[1] https://www.box.com/about-us/leadership [2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/box [3] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/dropbox [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)

Okay, but I think "first mover" is a poor description of a company that came later and executed better. It even seems to undermine the utility of the concept, if people looking backward just assign the moniker to whichever company succeeded.

Well, it does have 'move' in the word. It you're first and don't 'move'... well :)

I've never heard of box til this post and I've used dropbox for years.

https://techcrunch.com/2006/01/31/the-online-storage-gang/

Technically, yes. The correct question is how much! :)

> Will Dropbox valuation be affected by BOX's performance in the last few years?

It depends. If Dropbox shows that they are [not] profitable and the margins give us a better picture we can ignore Box. Looking at Google Finance the Box numbers are really bad: https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ABOX

I'm a paying Dropbox user (for personal stuff) and I use Google Drive and Box.com at work. Dropbox is far and away the easiest to use. Case in point, my very non-technical grandmother once called me because she was worried there was a virus on her computer, only to find out that she accidentally changed the homepage on her browser. But when it comes to using Dropbox, it's easy for her to navigate and look at her pictures.

+1 Also, the sync works much better than with Google Drive. The Google Drive app uses an absurd amount of resources and takes much longer to sync changes.

I wish they would add something like a .dropboxignore file. It's unusable for software development otherwise. It could be extremely useful.

Yeah! I have symlinks to some directories, but I don't necessarily want to sync _all_ files in those directories. I think we're probably the 1% use-case for this though. However, you'd think some dev over at Dropbox would add this feature to scratch his own itch...

You and me both. Heck, I posted the same request in this discussion as a snarky comment.

It's kind of baffling to me that people have been asking for this feature for years, with requests [1] having hundreds of comments and upvotes on their site, and it's still ignored. "Selective sync" is a very poor substitute.

[1] https://www.dropboxforum.com/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&...

It's not Dropbox, but SyncThing does support a `.stignore` file.

https://docs.syncthing.net/users/ignoring.html

What is the problem? Constantly uploading to the cloud every build?

I think it could be annoying to have Dropbox sync things like binaries or temp files. Some builds could generate hundreds of artifacts that are short lived or unwanted in the long run. As it works now, Dropbox would see all of these files and burn up your network (and some CPU) copying them to the cloud, which in turn copies them to your other computers, phones, iPads, etc.

Files on phones and iPads are only download on demand. They're certainly not stored locally.

I really think they've missed their time. Dropbox is an incredible product, definitely the best option out there for most people.

However, they're just not making enough $ or have enough future growth to be worth it. If they rejected an offer a few years ago, they really are going to be sad when they get an offer for half or one quarter that in a year or two.

  > If they rejected an offer a few years ago,

Funny story, that: https://techcrunch.com/2011/10/18/dropbox-said-no-to-nine-di...

Interviewed there back in '11. I actually didn't realize they hadn't gone public yet-- yikes.

There's more to life than getting acquired, right? I'm quite happy they aren't looking for a quick exit. Imagine what a sad "incredible journey" that would be...

It would be interesting to see what the public valuation would be. I don't believe it will be anywhere near the "$10 billion valuation it was awarded in a 2014 funding round."

Will DropBox be the first (/only) YC company to go public?

I can't remember any others going public ever, can someone correct me on this? Seems weird that, despite being so successful, no YC companies have IPOed before. Seems almost improbable, but I can't find evidence of any going public.

There have been no IPOs. The largest acquisition was Cruise, then Heroku, then OMGPop, then Parse.

The fall-off of acq prices is pretty steep, but given that they put up hardly any money ($17k early on, now $120k) the returns are insane.

When you look at annualized returns, they actually demolish avg. VC returns just from the number of companies that flip in 1-2 years for $10MM (or more).

Their biggest hurdle is scale (in terms of putting a lot of money to work).

dont forget twitch, second largest after cruise i think

Anyone have any sense of their financials? Revenue, cost, etc?

Would love to take a stab at valuing their equity although I'm sure their cap structure is a wedding cake of preferences on top of ratchets on top of pro ratas and pari passus and conversion preferences...

RE: financials -

around $400m in annualized revenue as of last summer (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-24/dropbox-is...). no recent news of their growth, but I would be surprised if they did more than 20-30% user growth since then (not bad, but not a rocketship anymore...which FTR is totally cool with me, even admirable at this stage!)

Jives with back envelope calcs: 400m+ users, assume 1% paid users = 4m+ paid users. each user pays something around $100/year (8.99/month if you pay up front, 9.99/month if you bill monthly, some legacy cheaper, some business customers). 4m x $100 = $400m. It's actually not a bad business! =)

Not sure about costs, but they are cash flow positive from what they've said publicly (http://www.recode.net/2016/6/14/11937132/dropbox-cash-flow-p...) and that's been confirmed from what I've heard anecdotally/personally from some senior folks over there and some VCs who I think would/should know (and that I trust..ha).

so overall, seems like a solid business, i think the issue now is whether they can grow at a rate that's exciting enough to the market to justify a $10b+ valuation...TBD!

as one kind of comparison (not definitive by any means, just one that we have the #s to do..): box did around 300m in revenue last year (so less than DB), but Box market cap was around 1.5B at that point, so 5X revenue. if you did the same math to DB, we're looking at around 2B market cap for DB...1/5 of their last raise at 10B =/

could be viewed as example of raising at higher valuation than prudent (not unusual ha), but who knows, maybe they'll pull a rabbit out of a hat =)

Yeah, they just might.

I was thinking about how to value companies like this over the weekend: fast growth, huge revenue, where it all gets eaten by opex. In a normal business you just look at gross profitability and assume a lot of opex will lead to long-term appreciation of the equity but, software is so damned competitive that it's like they need to keep plowing cash into opex just to stay relevant (vs grow the business)

In any case it's hard to fathom that a company with $400MM in ARR can be going public just now...nowhere near unprecedented given the recent huge financing rounds but man, that's just a big company, no two ways about it.

EDIT: One more comparable I've been watching a lot recently. New Relic is on track to do about 230-250M in the next 12 months. Their aggregate common is worth something like 1.6B right now, so your "5x revenue" might be a little conservative, I think they'll get more like 6-7x, and likely even more as consumer companies tend to get more interest from individuals because it's a name they know. My over/under on aggregate equity value at IPO is ~$4bln, will be interesting to see how big the float is.

> "as one kind of comparison (not definitive by any means, just one that we have the #s to do..): box did around 300m in revenue last year (so less than DB), but Box market cap was around 1.5B at that point, so 5X revenue. if you did the same math to DB, we're looking at around 2B market cap for DB...1/5 of their last raise at 10B =/"

This math drives me nuts!

The logic of directly tying valuations of a private company to the only public direct competitor in the space is flawed (analysis don't use GOOG,MSFT for this). Using the current logic; if Dropbox (private) beats the crap out of Box (public), this would result in reduced growth and reduced quarterly numbers for Box. However, Box's numbers are then used as indicators/benchmarks for the cloud storage space, and then used to price Dropbox.

When you look at Box's valuation, you should be aware that the price is partially because of risk/competition from Dropbox. How much of the price? I have no idea.

To borrow a comment from @barleyworth from another thread:

here are things that actually matter for valuing these sorts of companies:

* cost to acquire a customer (Box's S-1 notoriously had sales+marketing which was greater than their revenue)

* customer churn, or relatedly, lifetime value per customer

* subscriber growth

* margins (i.e. storage costs)

- Full disclosure I am an ex-Dropbox employee.

A lot of the cap structure will simplify at IPO when preferred shares convert to common.

I guess the situation is different for an existing holder of common vs. someone who's buying at the IPO. Thanks for pointing that out...I've spent too much time inside trying to figure out what my options are worth (SV in general, not Dropbox) ;)

Hm.. I wonder if this is because they have option grants expiring in 2017 (10 year mark) and are trying to get some liquidity for early employees.

The founders, VC, LP also want their returns (exit).

That's a good point. Presumably the funds that invested were raised around 2007 and also have a 10 year window.

Look. As a non-business, I recognize the fact that Dropbox is useful for both personal users and businesses. But every, single, time, that I login to their website, they INSIST on suggesting "hey why don't you try Dropbox for Business?" to me. This level of stupidity shakes my confidence in the competence of their upper management, and in Dropbox's future.

> This level of stupidity

Why do you assume this is stupidity? Just because it annoys you doesn't make it stupid. For one, Dropbox makes exponentially more money from a Business user than an individual.

Because I'm definitely an individual user, and not a business.

But on every page, Dropbox's website has a box, that either says:

    Dropbox Business is here!

    [Free Trial]

    Dropbox Business is here! Only $12.50/month.

    [Upgrade now]

No matter how compelling an offer that is, it's completely irrelevant to me, since I am NOT a business.

That doesn't mean it's stupid to ask. Extrapolating what annoys you to the totality of users would be far, far dumber.

Ok, maybe someday Dropbox will link you to a public LinkedIn page, figure out that you are unlikely to run a business, and stop advertising that product to you. But until they have that capability, they seem to have come to the conclusion that marketting to everyone in the hopes that you are part of the highly profitable few % is worthwhile.

Indeed. It's clearly not annoying enough to deter anyone from logging in if they're still complaining about it.

I pay for dropbox and they do that to me, as well. Why would I want to be a business customer if I'm a paid normal user?

Somewhat annoying but maybe it's working for them.

I doubt it's actually helping them at all. If anything, they just don't notice, because their business is primarily made up of Dropbox for Business accounts, so even if a paid personal user like me leaves because it's that's so annoying, they're not hurt by it at all. But even then, I rarely use their web interface, so it's not enough to push me away.

Yea I wonder what's up with that........

Many many years back, I used Sugarsync but ditched them a few months later for Dropbox when they screwed up my file sync.

Recently, I switched from annual to monthly subscription for Dropbox because I wanted to push myself to migrate my files off their service..mainly due to concerns about privacy..

I use Google Drive at work.. it's not great, but it works better than OneDrive. Wanted to use OneDrive as it came with my Office365 subscription..but their Mac and Android clients really need improving.

Almost moved to SpiderOak..but stopped due to their poorly designed Android app.

I can't seem to get myself off Dropbox. I don't use external hard disks for backup now. I digitize everything, so it's important to find a service I can trust...both on privacy and on sync reliability..

The sad truth is Dropbox clients across different platforms and their sync stability is unmatched in this space.

I completely agree. What's so nice about DropBox is how little I notice it. I'm a happy customer but interestingly I would be a wary investor. I'm not seeing their growth strategy. I've been looking for them to build on their advantage for about 7 years now. New products they've introduced to satellite around their core sync technology don't ever seem to hit traction.

That doesn't mean I think they're a decent business and will stay around. I just don't see much on the horizon that would push the business (and the stock) forward.

I still don't use dropbox anymore. There are tons of alternatives, many of which are better anyhow. http://www.drop-dropbox.com/

Dropbox is one of the products that I hope it never goes away. Been using it since I got invited to beta in May 2008 and the sync is trustworthy, what can't be said for other solutions (enough issues have been mentioned already). Extended the storage with the specials and treasure hunt, but kinda wish for more flexible plans though, I'd never have a use for full 1TB.

Maybe whoever acquires them will finally add support for per-folder exclusions (aka a .dropboxignore file). We can only hope.

I wonder if we will see a repeat of this story in the Dropbox IPO:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-17/big-ipo-ti...

Can someone explain the value proposition of Dropbox to me? They don't do anything that their competitors (OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, etc.) don't do better. Their UI isn't spectacular. They only really have one big product. They charge an insane amount for what they do offer. Their file sync is difficult to control and has an uninspiring client.

I get that people end up used to Dropbox, but what do they have to attract new users? Why do people see value here? A decade on, first-mover advantage isn't going to get them (or anyone) very far. It seems like their whole company is a competitor's marketing campaign away from being basically irrelevant.

It seems their one hope is business. But why would business choose Dropbox over Office 365, Box, or Google Drive. All of them seem to offer better collaboration/productivity tools. Office Delve is incredible. Google Drive is Google Drive. What's the value here?

And then I read articles like these: - http://www.theverge.com/2015/9/22/9372563/dropbox-really-is-... - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-24/dropbox-is... - http://www.businessinsider.com/the-clock-is-ticking-for-drop...

What am I missing?

I'm a sync quality engineer at Dropbox--on the team that writes and maintains the sync engine. So caveat, I'm clearly quite biased. :-)

> They don't do anything that their competitors (OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, etc.) don't do better.

I'm not sure on what you base this opinion. We do sync much, much better, and that's no coincidence--we work very hard on it (I'm new on this team, so I deserve essentially zero personal credit). It is our business. We're not an advertising company--doing sync well translates directly to dollars for us.

On a technical level, it is extremely nontrivial to get right multiplatform, in the face of races, vague filesystem semantics, application-specific behavior, offline, etc. Our competitors aren't even trying things like infinite (https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2016/04/announcing-projec...).

We're not sitting still, though. We're actually building a next generation sync engine right now (btw, more Rust @ Dropbox). The plan is that this will put even more distance between us and others.

As a happy user I second this. I've never been let down by their sync -- set it and forget it.

Also: thank you for Linux support :)

I would add:

* They only offer one service. I consider this a feature: they're not off building smart cars, they're not about to release a Dropbox wearable.

* It's not tied to any platform (Microsoft, Apple, Google). It's their core product. They have to be dependable.

* They charge money. None of my folders are brought to me by coca-cola. They're not "Sorted based on intelligent algorithms". And never has Dropbox prompted me with "Check out what documents are trending with your friends!"

* They don't encourage me to just keep everything "on the cloud". All my data is still on my devices.

It's a solid, dead simple, stable product that I hope never goes away.

There are definitely some interesting features in development. Things like placeholders (infinite) have been in OneDrive for a while (then removed because Microsoft) and then were reintroduced. I remember a few years ago a company I was working for used dropbox and I was shocked when installing DropBox instantly depleted my local storage - it felt totally bizarre that infinite functionality wasn't the default as that was what I was used to with OneDrive.

I'd like to see some evidence that sync is actually better in a significant way that is noticeable to the user - noticeable enough to warrant an incredible premium. For example, $10/month or $100/year gets me full office for my entire home and mobile, 1TB of storage, and Skype minutes (not that anyone cares about that perk). If its just for one person, that goes down to $7/month or $70/year. Why should I pay $10/month for just 1Tb of storage and slightly better sync?

EDIT: After reading some other comments, I see some evidence that your syncing is in fact better. It might be useful to highlight that specifically rather than making the blanket statement (e.g. faster, more robust rather than better). Now I might take a look at dropbox especially as my reliance on Office is decreasing.

> Things like placeholders (infinite)

Yep, we're definitely aware of MS's placeholders. Infinite is different in several key ways, not the least of which is that it is cross-platform. And doing this well on Mac is particularly tricky.

More detail on the tech blog:

https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2016/05/going-deeper-with-pro...

I like this response. It seems like jamwt is actually trying pretty hard not to be biased. If I were at Dropbox, I'd probably also want to point out that just about every competitor that's been listed here is a Dropbox copycat. On the other hand, we all know that great copycats come along all the time and do something new much better than the original. The real question about the value proposition for Dropbox is how its value proposition stacks up against competitors. I can't speak to Box and I don't think OneDrive has much going for it beyond being attached to the Microsoft ecosystem (which makes it the default winner for a whole bunch of Microsoft-oriented people and companies and the opposite for just about everyone else). On the other hand, Google Docs, Spreadsheets, etc., gives Google Drive a really strong position for eating into Dropbox. I haven't made up my mind yet - I've found a lot I don't like about Dropbox, but I've also found Google Drive to be riddled with problems, both from a UX standpoint and in terms of the basic architectural layout. If Dropbox does the right things over time, they can continue to offer the best value in the market - I'm just not sure I've seen them doing that recently.

I'm quite heavy user, about 100GB data, some hundred k files, constantly synching software projects over 3-4 machines and also work with those on different machines. Since I got rid of too long paths, there has been zero problems with sync. It just works and it is fast.

My only complaints currently are the slow initial sync and the stuff infinite will fix.

For professional use I don't see the price as a problem. For personal use I would love some "cold storage" with cheaper per GB price, but familiar interface (just drop pictures to some folder and they would disappear from disk and end up in storage).

With the Dropbox brand there might be more opportunities in business world. Companies are for example still moving lots of stuff via (S)FTP.

Just want to note that only Dropbox seems to be able to handle multiple (as in, a dozen) git repos...... the linux client runs a little hot on the memory while it scans the full list, but it actually syncs in a reasonable amount of time without crashing. Which is more than I can say about OneDrive and Google Drive...

So, thanks for that :)

Aren't you afraid that once a good standard exists for file syncing, which every OS then implements, dropbox will lose its business case?

General, aren't you afraid that once all the governments of the world agree to unify and eliminate all conflict, you'll be out of a job?

Are you really proposing that a universal file syncing protocol which must be implemented across all OSes for every FS will eat Dropbox's lunch?

First of all, they've had a pretty good run so far, so the bet against that seems to have worked out.

Also, changing markets are part of the difficulty for almost all businesses. Apple would have been in serious peril of losing the business case of their ipods once everyone else was making cheaper devices with all of ipod functionality (plus phone calls!); fortunately they adapted.

> It seems their one hope is business

It's always been that way. Individual accounts make very little money compared to enterprise accounts. Individual accounts significantly contribute to mindshare, but don't pay the bills.

Dropbox and Box have recently been named as Leaders by Gartner in their magic quadrant (normally reg-walled, but pic in this recent article [1]). Microsoft and Google have been named as Challengers.

Dropbox actually runs a pretty innovative shop [2] on a technical level. For the enterprise, Google and Microsoft offer basic run-of-the-mill storage bundled with their respective office-and-apps suites, while Dropbox and Box have a similar approach of offering APIs to make it possible to create addons or apps that integrate with the datastore or individual documents.

In a way, this enables line-of-business apps to be built that use Dropbox as backend storage and operate on documents stored in Dropbox, which has the capability to challenge a Word or Excel-based workflow.

[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gartner-enterprise-file-stora...

[2] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/

Individual accounts make very little money compared to enterprise accounts.

Is there any source where we can find the % of revenue coming from enterprise vs small accounts for the average Saas co.

Since box.com and dropbox are private, that don't disclose that information. However, when they file, they might give some semblance of a breakdown/comparison.

Box is public, but they don't break down "small team" / individual revenue vs enterprise.

They are, however, pushing hard not just for enterprise customers, but for service contracts and "Box Consulting" services. These are where companies like IBM, etc. really make bank.

So this suggests that individual accounts like those Dropbox is more well-known for, are either unprofitable or very low-margin. This may also explain why Dropbox charges more than everyone else.

Box is a public company: http://www.boxinvestorrelations.com/press-release/financial-...

They don't split out enterprise revenue but do talk about all their enterprise clients and that it is 59% of the Fortune 500.

Box isn't private. http://www.nasdaq.com/symbol/box

Box isn't private, they IPO'ed around a year and a half ago I believe.

My organization is ~10 people. We all pay for the Dropbox Pro account individually because it's cheaper per user this way. At what number of people does the Business account tier make sense?

https://www.dropbox.com/business

>My organization is ~10 people. We all pay for the Dropbox Pro account individually because it's cheaper per user this way. At what number of people does the Business account tier make sense?

Not sure. The number of people where saying "hey go pay for this yourself" isn't acceptable behavior I suppose?

"paying individually" != "pay for this yourself"

Then the company is reimbursing an individual license which might not be okay with the license terms. :-/ I can't recall which, but I think that wasn't okay with JetBrains for example.

https://www.dropbox.com/plans

The pricing seems pretty straightforward - both are priced per user and business is more expensive. It just seems to be a price vs features trade off unless I'm missing something.

I don't know why Dropbox doesn't let me pay a few dollars a month. I don't need 1 TB but I would pay for 50 GB … there's no such offer.

Dropbox sells communication and peace of mind, which they believe to be worth $10. The amount of storage synced isn't really the product. Think about it like this: what if, rather than promising 1TB, Dropbox promised to sync "all your files"? Would you find that a more attractive offer?

I think the reason is similar to why Apple is offering 16 and 64 GB smartphone tiers, but not 32 GB.

I think this is more reasonable than you might think.

It might seem like 32GB is a good baseline, but I am using 3.1 GB on my 4 year old smartphone and 16GB is probably plenty for the vast majority of people. But, if your actually recording video etc then 32GB is not that useful.

32GB flash drives are like 8$. So, Apple saves a few dollars on millions of phones and people who think they might actually needs extra storage get a significant amount.

Interesting Apple do have a 50gb storage tier for iCloud for 79p/mo.

huh. that's new. but they have 16, 64, and 128.

I'm a Dropbox paying user and have used Google Drive in the past, gave OneDrive a trial and interact with Box.com from time to time.

I'm still on Dropbox because:

    - Dropbox has a Linux client; meaning they actually give
      a shit about me as their customer; yes, you can find 
      either half-baked / broken projects for Google Drive 
      or have to trust yet another third party with all your data 
      (e.g. Insync), but none of that works for me. Of course,
      Dropbox might choose to stop supporting Linux, but 
      that day will be the day when I'm dropping them.
      

    - Dropbox has a 1 year versioning add-on, that works 
      for all your files. My data is very important to me
      and Google Drive only does 1 month, whereas OneDrive
      only does versioning for Office documents. Basically
      OneDrive is completely useless as a backup solution -
      get a ransom virus on your computer and watch in horror
      how your data is gone

    - the desktop client is probably the best and has nice 
      touches to it. It can sync from your local LAN and on
      OS X at least it offers to import your photos and it 
      automatically saves your screenshots and generates
      links ready to copy/paste. I mean, the clients of
      of both Google Drive and Onedrive are slow, 
      featureless and unreliable. Not sure what you mean
      by "uninspiring" there     

    - in general it has better integration with third-parties
      than the others, because Dropbox is considered the
      "neutral" solution. MS Office has integration
      with Dropbox for example ;-)

    - the web UI could need improvement, they keep nagging 
      me to try their Business plan, but I'm really not
      using the web UI much, I really don't have much need 
      for it

The price is fair IMHO, because that's all of my data. Sure, I'm not paying $5/month for a password manager or other unjustifiable crap, but 13 EUR/month (includes VAT and the versioning add-on) keeps my 100 GB of family photos and my books and my work documents safe and available everywhere.

Also, Google killed Google Talk, Google Reader, Picasa (partially) and Wave. And in the case of Microsoft, OneDrive is just a useless freebie they toss along with that expensive Office 365 subscription in order to justify its value.

For such a simple service (i.e. "It's just syncing!") their competitors sure seem to have had a hell of a time replicating the product despite having had nearly a decade to do so.

I have recently tried Google Drive, OneDrive and Amazon Cloud Drive and none of them compared to Dropbox at all. Syncing was slower or more inconsistent. Dropbox syncing is not always perfect but seems to be a lot better than everything else.

The UI, both in terms of desktop client and website were slower and clunkier with GD/OD/ACD. All seem to make sharing more difficult than Dropbox does. Versioning is questionable.

I haven't tried iCloud Drive in earnest but at first glance I don't see any way to check the status of syncing, nor do I see any indication that files are versioned. So that's really a no go right there. Will it one day be better than Dropbox? Maybe. But it isn't today.

Just adding that you should make backups anyway, possibly on some sort of media that is offline and in a different location. No cloud service is really safe. I'm not saying Dropbox or OneDrive could disappear tomorrow, but yeah, they technically could, or they could lose part of your data. Even Gmail lost some user emails a few years ago. How many people do you know who backup their mailbox these days? :-)

There's also silent corruption and bit rotting that may happen locally and which you wouldn't notice on any of those services. Particularly if you use old filesystems such as HFS+: there are quite a few stories of people losing pictures or finding artifacts in jpg/raw files years later.

I'm sure you're not, but if by any chance you're relying on Dropbox versioning or whatever similar "backup solution" please consider alternatives.

Or for added peace of mind, you could just sign up for a cheapo Mover.io account, and auto-sync your Dropbox once a week to an S3 bucket.

I use Dropbox on 2 machines which means I have 3 copies of everything. I use Github for source code (in Dropbox and Github) and I use Google Photo's for my pictures (free and also in both places). I would feel pretty good with just Dropbox but with the combination I'm pretty well covered with the stuff I care about.

Dropbox should hire you for their marketing. Versioning is important to me (mostly for Office which is why OneDrive has been fine) so a robust solution is appealing. Screenshot linking is nice. Thanks for the info! :)

13 EUR/month for 100GB? Is that a typo?

I pay something like 10$/month for 1TB with Drive.

Dropbox is also $9.99/mo for 1TB as per https://www.dropbox.com/plans

So either a typo or maybe they're saying they have 100GB of stuff in a 1TB plan

100 GB is just the size of my family photos archive.

It's the local EUR price including VAT for the 1 TB subscription I guess.

I love Dropbox and am a paying customer. It just does the thing I want it to do, and nearly everyone I work with also has it, so getting started with a folder to collaborate with any ad-hoc group of writers, designers, or coders, is usually a 2 minute affair. It's hardly free but it's a trivial cost in the context of a year of business.

What, exactly, does Google Drive do "better" than be a totally hassle free way to sync a folder? I don't really see a lot of room for improvement.

Did I mention it just does what I expect it to do?

I find this argument highly compelling: http://www.michaelrwolfe.com/2013/10/19/why-is-dropbox-more-...

The most important thing you are missing is traction. They reached half a billion signups recently, and have many millions of active users, which is very valuable in itself.

Sure, if you were you start a file syncing dropbox competitor today you would have a hard time, but the position they are in is far more defensible simply because they have a massive user base.

It's the same reason why WhatsApp was acquired for billions, their "value proposition" from a product and feature set point of view was weak, but they had a traction and a massive user base. And having a massive user base is almost all that matters nowadays.

The reason WhatsApp is valuable is because a chat app is rather useless without a massive userbase. That's not true for file syncing.

Having a massive user base may be all that matters for inherently social applications, but Dropbox is definitely not one of those.

It matters because an established DropBox user might not care to add other services.

For example, all the new students in my lab will be using DropBox, because its what their PI uses.

It depends how much it's used for sharing files.

I've been using dropbox for many many years now. I had a lot of space because of the space race thing they did when I was in school. I still have about 7 GB of space which is ok for the moment.I would not pay for more space though. I have a NAS connected to the internet anyway. I am pretty sure a majority of the billion users also will not pay. So what is the point in having so many users?

The jury is still out on conversion numbers for those sign-ups. If you were on a mission to maximize freely available online storage space, wouldn't you sign up for all available?

Not sure on box, I can tell you for OneDrive and Google Drive, if you have multiple people working against a shared directory - good luck. Their ability to sync with multiple clients hitting the same data is HORRENDOUS. We've got what amounts to FREE Onedrive as part of our ELA and the company still forks over for Dropbox because the shared user experience is lightyears ahead.

On the consumer side, Dropbox has better UX than Google Drive (I've never tried Box nor OneDrive).

When I tried out Google Drive, syncing was actually incredibly poor. As in, only one computer could synchronize files at a time (meaning, if computer B logs in while computer A is logged in, computer A gets logged out). Since I have multiple computers, this instantly killed Google Drive for me.

In addition, Google Drive (at least back when I tried it out) did not have "instant" file synchronization. Meaning, it took the Google Drive app a minute or two or recognize that files have changed and to upload/download them. Dropbox always recognized changes within a second or two.

Dropbox's web UI was also far better than Google Drive's. When you select multiple files to download on Dropbox's website, it starts instantly. Google Drive makes you wait and even offers to email you when the file are ready to download. Several times, I never actually got those emails.

>When I tried out Google Drive, syncing was actually incredibly poor.

I've been using Google Drive for years. Since when has it supported local folder syncing? <researching...> oh it looks like Google uses Linux for Android, Linux for Chromebooks, many of their developers run Linux. Lots of their data centres run Linux. But the Google Drive doesn't have a daemon for Linux. The product manager is a shitforbrains and should be fired.

Since it first debuted?

https://www.google.com/drive/download/

When I tried out Google Drive, syncing was actually incredibly poor.

It still is, it doesn't sync chunks, but only full files. Moreover, it does not have LAN (peer to peer) sync, which Dropbox does have.

Dropbox's web UI was also far better than Google Drive's. When you select multiple files to download on Dropbox's website, it starts instantly. Google Drive makes you wait

And Dropbox has basic functionality like getting an overview of shared folders/files, which is for some unfathomable reason not possible in Google Drive (instead you have to rely on 3rd party scripts that scan all files).

I used tried most file sync app extensively (Dropbox, Onedrive, Google drive, Box, copy). While Dropbox is not perfect (had a crashing bug for a month), it has the best client on all major systems that I use (Windows, Linux, IOS) and is constantly innovating. The automatically installed "sharing Icon" (round thing in word) was an intrusion I didn't like. Some people thought it's a virus.

My university has "unlimited" google drive space, but it is a sad joke. While it is fine for a few google sheets/doc, it can't handle a few GB reliably. The client itself crashes on three different windows versions constantly and is a MAJOR resource hog. Google itself states it is not made to handle things like backups. Some of my folders are not synced correctly, don't know what is going on there. Once it followed a link to a network drive and started copying everything from there to the hard drive until it was full, that was fun. It is also not possible to unsync subfolders (if the app ever loads all folers), which is ridiculous, because my hardrive is not "unlimited" and now I have to make different first level folder for everything that I don't want on my laptop. Talk about usability.

OneDrive is an okay user experience on windows. They tried to partially sync but show all files, which definitely causes confusion. At least they try to innovate here. When they cut down the free tier I moved, because it is not as good as the Dropbox client. It also does some things with synced word files, which I don't fully understand and to be honest my trust is just gone after the privacy turd of Windows 10 (which I use and find OK otherwise). Copy.com was very promising but was shut down for small time users.

I used Box.com only shortly, wasn't even close to Dropbox at that time. Probably still doesn't have a Linux client.

TLDR: I started paying for Dropbox and am rather happy. Small innovations like the scanning features eliminate friction even more, so they are working on things that I actually use. Dropbox is miles ahead of its competition.

What's wrong with their client? I'm really looking forward to the Infinite updates and have never had any issues with DropBox (or OneDrive).

Google Drive on Mac though... Complete and total Hell of an experience. Really wanted to use it because Google/Gmail. But, we always had:

* Syncing issues with the team,

* CPU resources were insane,

* Freezing when closing the app,

* Tying to upload a relatively large file (~8gb) would just trash our home network.

Maybe it was just our setup though. I would go back to them in a heartbeat if they worked on anything. :/

Well, the UI used to make sense on the Mac before the redesign to a godawful all-black-and-white-looks-nothing-like-OS-X client maybe 2 years ago.

They support everything (including desktop Linux). They support sharing. And organisations.

Many things do some of that. Few do it all.

Obligatory: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

Thanks for this

I'm curious why you think Dropbox's features are done better by Google Drive? They are vastly different in ease of use, and, I think, in intended use. Dropbox is vastly simpler for storing documents on your local machine and in the cloud, simultaneously, in sync. Google Drive does not do this nearly as reliably. I used it for awhile and many things would inexplicably not sync.

I am a Ubuntu user and lack of native client for Google Drive is a recurring annoyance. However I do not see the need to buy Dropbox subscription, even though Dropbox has a near flawless Linux client, as Google drive is already included with Google Apps and my company runs on Google Apps. Having a centralized console to manage all user users and resources is why I stick with Google Drive.

> They don't do anything that their competitors (OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, etc.) don't do better.

I'm curious why you think their competitors are superior?

Having tried all the major solutions, Dropbox is by far my favorite. It just works—I don't have to manually control files, I don't have to worry about being forced into a janky web editor, and I don't have to think.

I migrated from Dropbox to Google Drive.

- Better integration with Google Apps. - Better integration with various Android apps. - More free space.

Lack of ecosystem lock-in beyond Dropbox the product is amazing, and I've never in several years of using it been anything but 100% satisfied. Unfortunately I'm expecting it to be crushed any day now by competitors who can bundle their analogous products with other ubiquitous software (e.g. Gmail).

I think they're the only one w linux support? (Not that I expect that to be a significant marketshare)

Didn't know that and have since moved to Google drive. We use box at the corporate level. https://www.dropbox.com/install?os=lnx

It's not difficult to mount Box on Linux. Google Drive integration comes built into Nautilus IIRC. There are other solutions for Linux integrations with both.

Perhaps not as easy as Dropbox but can't see it being a winning USP.

I read somewhere that Google Drive has a Linux client used by Google enployees internally—so if it were significant, it would probably only be a matter of time before this client would be released for public use.

I don't think it is significant though.

I'm a mixed Linux / OS X user.

> It's not difficult to mount Box on Linux

It is, I've been there.

> Google Drive integration comes built into Nautilus IIRC

All available Google Drive "integrations" for Linux are complete shit. The only one that works is Insync.com, a commercial solution that implies you have to give the access to all of your data to yet another third-party.

> I read somewhere that Google Drive has a Linux client used by Google enployees internally

This just adds salt to injury. In other words they don't give a crap about their customers, preferring instead to just sit on that big pile of money they make from advertising and intruding on their users' lives.

> I don't think it is significant though.

But of course it is. Anything having to do with file storage also has to do with servers and Linux is the most popular server operating system, successfully used as a home server as well. For cheap you can setup a Raspberry Pi, with an external hard-drive and you could sync all of your files, as a private backup. Heck, all sorts of projects could use Google Drive for online storage.

The actual significance is that they don't want people to do this, plus the Linux desktop competes with both Android and Chrome OS, being a conflict of interest. And like any other company that wants to control the underlying platform, for lock-in purposes, they only develop apps on a need-to-do basis, only for really popular platforms and they aren't doing a good job on non-Google OSes. For example their iOS apps are inferior and with less features than the Android ones. Microsoft has taught them well.

Their UI is much better than their competitors, and they have some great major and minor features being released that others don't have, and they charge the standard set by their competitors.

Sure, compared to buying a physical drive it is expensive, or compared to setting up your own VPS, but there are clear downsides to those options.

I recently looked into moving form our current (really shitty yet fascinatingly expensive) cloud storage solution, and even though I still have a grudge against them for shutting down Mailbox...Dropbox was by far the best solution for us.

I can create dropbox accounts for everyone in my family and set them up on all their various devices, and manage all those accounts.

I can have a linux box running and connected to all those dropbox accounts giving us local physical backups of all that dropbox stuff.

I don't see how I can easily do that with apple or google. Maybe there are other newer services that can do that, but I don't want to take the time to figure it all out.

Why should any of that be proprietary, online services you pay for forever first with eroded privacy and then with money?

My NAS has coherent open source alternatives to heaps of cloud stuff including Dropbox:

https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/6.0/cloud_file_syncing

Dropbox significantly outperforms its competitors when it comes to file sync performance.

https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/2015/10/sync-performance/

You might be surprised how much that actually matters.

Disclaimer: I used to work at Dropbox, so I'm biased.

And what makes you think the company with the best product wins? Or the best guy for the girl? Or the best gal for the job?

Google Drive sync is nowhere close to Dropbox's sync in terms of reliability. I've had Google Drive create entire copies of folders while URL-encoding every filename in the second copy, for example. Dropbox is the only one I can trust at the moment.

Dropbox just works in the way you expect it to. Google Drive has value because of collaboration features and the fact that pretty much everyone has Gmail, but Dropbox is more intuitive to get working as a local filesystem. That's pretty much what it comes down to. Dropbox just works.

I use their beta product "Dropbox Paper" a lot, it's really good.

Although fairly niche but the lack of Google Drive and OneDrive support in Linux left with me with Dropbox and combined with a free 50g deal from my S4, it was a fine arrangement in the end.

All of their employees are fanatical about their service. I've asked the same question and usually it boils down to a hip je ne sais qois.

Dropbox Infinite has a lot of potential to take the cloud to the next level.

Dropbox does follow symlinks and google drive doesn't.

I wonder if a Dropbox made NAS linked to a dropbox account make sense. I will then has the best both world.

Another problem i have with all current cloud storage is lack of file management features, things like check for duplication by filename or size or hash. Currently I have multiple SD card, USB HDD all scatter around with many duplicate data.

So I have a question about this, for them to be deciding this now, does that mean Dropbox has something to confident about at the moment or it could just mean anything?

I think this is posturing and a final warning to interested buyers "Buy us now, or we're going public"

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