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Comment by jliptzin | Hacker News Reader

Dropbox is in a tough situation because they're charging 5x as much as competitors for roughly the same service (I'm comparing the monthly 100gb plan), yet they can't lower the price because they likely have a massive number of customers who are fine with paying $10 / month and/or don't know about cheaper competitors...so the price will likely stay put until they start to see signs of their existing base churning out, but by then their competitors may already have won over a lot of mindshare.

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The thing is that there is no competition to Dropbox that works equally well. It's like saying 'BMW is feeling the heat from all those Dacia's being sold'. No they're not, they're in different markets, providing a premium product for a premium price. People who care about 10$ / month for something that they presumably use every day are customers you need to drop asap anyway.

Well for my purposes, and this is subjective, google drive works equally well. Granted I may not need all the features that dropbox offers anyway. However, google seems to be quickly coming up to par with the rest of dropbox's offerings, and in the long run as cloud storage becomes more and more of a commodity the only differentiator will be price.

Google Drive's online stuff is good, but the syncing client is still way worse than Dropbox unfortunately. Slow to scan your folder and uses lots of cpu/ram, uses all your upload bandwidth and kills the connection, no delta syncs, no local network syncs, has to reupload the whole file if you move it to a new location, etc.

I've also found it the worst at handling temporary connection issues. Dropbox, Box, etc. will start up as soon as they see internet without a problem but Google Drive will just sit there until I quit and restart it.

Sure, and plenty of people are perfectly happy with their Dacias, and there is nothing wrong with that. Cars never became a commodity and never will, even if todays cheapest cars have features the most of expensive ones of just 15 years ago didnt't. Dropbox isn't just 'storage', it's a service that has plenty of options to differentiate.

>Dropbox is in a tough situation because they're charging 5x as much as competitors for roughly the same service

Care to name some of the competitors?

Besides Google Drive, I mean, which I won't use (tried it, and it was crap compared to Amazon, but am trying to avoid Google in general, and I don't want to encourage their bundling of Google Apps with the Drive).

Google Drive, OneDrive, and now it looks like amazon is throwing their hat into the ring. These are all cheaper options. I switched to google drive from dropbox without a problem.

box.com and mega are also working in the same space to some extent.

If you have the time installing the open-source, self hosted owncloud probably would be cheaper.

OVH's hubiC service is only €1/mo for 100 GB. Their servers are all physically located in France, for what it's worth.

It's too bad Google irritated so many customers. I try to avoid Google, but find it hard.

Sounds like a textbook case for http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination.

The link says that is about a single provider. Just because Dropbox is more expensive than a competitor doesn't mean it's price discrimination.

I'm not referring to Dropbox versus its competitors. I'm suggesting that Dropbox should focus on price discrimination for its own product lineup, because Dropbox apparently (at least as explained by jliptzin) has potential customers with a high variance of willingness to pay.

It seems discrimination is a loaded term. Price Discrimination isn't a bad thing. It refers to the practice of getting a customer to pay exactly what they can for a good. A common example of price discrimination is airline tickets. If you buy a ticket 3 months in advance vs 3 days in advance you essentially pay more for the same product.

What DropBox needs/should/could figure out is a way to sell subscriptions at $10 to those who are comfortable for paying $10 (which seems to me is completely unlikely, when you get competitors, cost tends to go down)

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