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Comment by channelmeter | Hacker News Reader

Agreed. I always wished Dropbox had a lower, entry-level tier for around $5/month. I don't need 50gb. I just need 5-10gb.

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There's no need to even have tiers - it would be great if they would just charge you $X/GB/month over the free amount.

I'd think it's a deliberate design choice having it this way. If you think about it, paying only for actually used space would mean a lot smaller income for the company.

Maybe it would also erode the magic in it - people would start thinking if they should have this and that files on Dropbox or not. Or accidentally piling up huge bills doing some mistake managing their files...

I don't know about that. Sure, there are some people using 5-10GB of a 50GB account, but I'm sure there are lots of people that are sticking with the free account when they'd gladly pay a little bit $1-$2 for slightly more storage, and people at the other end that are either frustrated by the 100GB limit or haven't even bothered using the service because they know they need to store more than 100GB.

I trust Dropbox has done extensive market research and concluded that having two price tiers, plus the other benefits that come with such simplified pricing, outweigh the flexibility of usage-based pricing.

Actually, you can reach that capacity through referrals. I have 8 GB for free, for example.

This is totally self serving (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3126173). If you're on the free plan, you should be able to max out your referrals at somewhere between 8-10GB of free space for you (they may have lowered it). I got 30 referrals for less than $10....give it a shot, I've had friends try this recently and they didn't end up spending more than $15.

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