Dropbox Startup Lessons Learned
slideshare.net
slideshare.net
The rest of the videos from this conference are good too: http://www.justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/videos
This is indeed an incredibly important lesson learned.
So the business model (from our point of view) is: pay nothing until you're hooked, then its $1,400/year. Ouch! We have to find a different solution.
And what is that money paying for? Of course from Dropbox's point of view its "what the market will bear". But from the customer point of view?
They say its to "increase your space". But its MY disk drive, I already bought it. So that seems phoney right off.
Maybe for all the network transfer costs? Hm, we have 1Gb, to copy it all every week between all of our computers would annualize to a few dollars, not $1400.00.
I know they seem successful, but they're still leaving some folks out in the cold with this business model.
They keep a copy of all your data on their servers. Not just a copy, but the change history of every file so you can revert to previous revisions of individual files.
Dropbox didn't change their business model to a "repository/history" type thing. It has been this way from the very beginning.
It sounds like you just didn't understand the original intent of Dropbox and were using it for a purpose that it is not entirely designed for.
Dropbox syncs all of your files with their servers. Lets say you have 2 computers with Dropbox installed and under the same account. You can add FileA to one of the Dropbox folders. It will sync that file with the server and then all Dropbox clients sync with the server. This is useful in that you could format both computers and lose all physical copies of FileA. However, as soon as you re-install Dropbox it will sync with the server again and download FileA from Dropbox.
It has always been a lightweight and easy to use cloud-backup solution. The collaboration and shared folders have been just sort of a bonus.
If you want to just keep several machines in sync without the middleman then you are going to need to look into other solutions. Something like rsynch might be a good option.
In fact the word "server" doesn't occur until the 18th bullet point. If this is a the major feature point, they need to talk pointedly with their marketing guy.
https://www.dropbox.com/help/19
Summary: If you need more space, you upgrade one account and share the folders with your other users.
I can watch a video or sign in to an account. Great, but the people I am recommending this to want to share a file: why is there no file upload widget on the homepage?
Judging by the downvotes, I guess nobody agrees with me :)