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Comment by apetresc | Hacker News Reader

What a lot of us want is more granularity. I'm totally fine with their per-GB pricing, but if I (as a personal user) want more than 1TB, it is literally impossible to buy it from Dropbox. I would have to upgrade to a business plan, which makes no sense as I'm not a business.

Basically, there are only 3 Dropbox tiers: 0, 1TB, or infinity.

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Dropbox is not charging per GB because they don't really pay per GB. Their model depends on people not having a lot of original content so you might have some home movies or whatnot but if you upload 500GB the bulk of that is probably 3rd party games / Movies etc.

So really, most people are buying <30 GB of storage + a lot of bandwidth and a decent UI.

With that in mind the number of people with more than 1TB to store either need a streaming service or actually have original content which breaks their model.

I gave up and just started using AWS S3 directly. I use a few GB, pay a few pennies for storage, a few more pennies for bandwidth if I'm moving stuff around, and that's it. I've never paid more than $10/month, and it's usually under $1/month.

that defeats the whole purpose of dropbox though. You can have a cheap ftp server for $10/year if you look hard enough.

But the argument for dropbox is that you have a client for almost every platform you can use. With S3 you'll have to use a 3rd-party software, which might not function properly.

What client(s) do you use to access your bucket? What kind of sharing features do they have? Is there a web frontend? And how do you deal with eventual consistency?

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