Comment by tinyhouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tinyhouse | Hacker News Reader

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I like Dropbox but I think they now focus more on enterprise and forgot individual users which led them to where they are today.

First is the price. If you need more space than the free option provides, the cheapest upgrade is $100/year. The competition is about $25/year. The $100 doesn't even contain basic features like full text search when searching your Dropbox folder in the browser. You need to pay more for that. I'm sure most companies don't mind paying the extra cost for a better service, but individual users are much more likely to go with the significantly cheaper option even if that means inferior product.

I totally understand that for the big tech companies it's easier to lower prices and even lose money to gain market share. Dropbox will need to find a way to fight back.

Individual users are definitely no longer their focus, and it makes sense why.

You could see their individual focus for a long time (ex. developing Mailbox and Carousel) and in an ideal (and theoretical) world, it sounds wonderful to have a consumer-SaaS company focused on delivering amazing software to the masses and making money directly from it. But at the end of the day, you can't ignore the real world and the messy side of business.

I (and I'm sure a big chunk of the HN population) would love to support a company like this, but there just aren't enough of us. Drew & team probably found out how difficult getting people to pay for stuff (especially productivity software) really is.

This enterprise shift is necessary for Dropbox's survival.

Annecdata, but I would gladly pay iff they were a zero-knowledge company (they should never see cleartext), but they aren't and I must assume that will limit enterprise adoption as well.

I have _literally_ looked for an alternative for more than a decade, but nobody can touch Dropbox on a really wide range of metrics and the trend amount competitors seems to move away from the hyper-simple file system abstraction.

I think I have tried most commercial options and practically all open source alternatives. I had high hopes for Syncthing, but I found high load and erratic syncing (was testing with 320 GB). Also no iOS client and no partial sync :(

Regular paying user here. I agree that it's overpriced. They need to fight back on features. They'll never win on price alone.

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