Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro
gist.github.com
gist.github.com
GOG.com sells all their games in north american prices because it only has offices in north america. You are buying a product from north america when you buy from them. Dropbox, Steam, Nintendo, Sony all have offices in Europe. So you aren't buying a foreign product and you do not account for a currency conversion as there isn't one.
Taxes are an important consideration. For example if you buy a $500 cell phone from north america and have it shipped to Europe. You will pay less for the phone but when it crosses the border you pay considerable taxes such that the "deal" is no longer worth it.
If import taxes were applied to physical as well as digital goods, as they probably should be, you would actively want to buy from a European company within Europe. You currently do for most goods, because it actually saves you money.
It's the lag on charging tax for imported digital goods. Otherwise you are earning Euros you are spending Euros, there is no currency conversion.
They also price their stuff in EUR, have offices in Poland and the company is registered on Cyprus.
I don't get what you are saying. Do you think that the number will always be 300 everywhere. 300 Yen, 300 pounds?
A $1300 Macbook costs £1,000 here in the UK which is roughly 30% more expensive than a direct currency conversion would have you expect. If you take that $1300 Macbook, add 30% and convert that to Euros it just happens to be that it works out at about €1300 which is what they charge in Germany. Someone posted about that here earlier.
Most of that 30% is due to VAT at around 20% for much of Europe, plus another 10%. It's that last 10% that's the real price difference of the goods.
Personally, I think the main cause of that is the generally higher cost of doing business in Europe (UK included). Everything costs more here. Petrol (Gas) and hence transport, wages, property, corporate tax rates, etc. It's hard, if possible at all, to find anything that's cheaper over here and all of that feeds in to the cost of doing business. The first time I visited the US I was shocked at just how much cheaper _everything_ seemed to be. Frankly, I'm surprised it's only another 10%.
Numbeo corroborates this: http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?coun...
If you go for groceries, and you see that staple food hasn't increased much, but meat/poultry/fish has gone up in prices due to local producers increasing their prices to match the exporters - so now a kilo of decent beef steaks is around R$35 (~US$15,50), when it could be had for R$10 in 2008.
Entertainment is expensive: movie tickets for US$15. Paul McCartney played in São Paulo a few years back and the cheapest tickets were going for US$300. Nightclubs all have a cover charge of at least US$30. A bus ride from São Paulo to Rio (which is equivalent to Boston-NYC) costs +/- US$30. Any passable restaurant will cost at least US$35/person. I went to visit my parents last year, we went out for a nice pizza place by the beach - R$75 each pizza.
Taking a look at these things, if you are a Brazilian tourist visiting any European/North American city, most of the things you will see are not related to basic cost of living - mostly entertainment and general shopping - and these are indeed cheaper compared to Brazil.
Also, not all states have the same amount of sales tax and some have no tax at all. It would be impossible to show the prices with sales tax when there are 50 different states with differing sales tax laws.
Current practice is, that the tax of the country, where the company is in-cooperated applies.
With that move, the EU wants, that every country is getting their share, and not like is now, that some countries are getting it. But this added bureaucracy is making it much harder for smaller companies.
Heck, the state level sales tax rates are even the easy part. Within states there are counties which often levy additional sales tax, and then cities within the counties do it as well. These county and municipal tax rates are additionally often comprised of a variety of "temporary assessments" which appear and expire seemingly at random. Knowing which rate is charged at a given location devolves into a very difficult problem once you realize there's no centralized address-to-jurisdiction database, nor a centralized jurisdiction-to-tax-rate database.
Which is exactly the problem considering the Euro is 30% stronger than the dollar right now. It's also wrong, the $300 Wii U[0] is 275€[1], which is roughly correct ($300 + 20% french VAT is 274€)
[0] http://www.amazon.com/Nintendo-Wii-Mario-Luigi-Deluxe-U/dp/B...
[1] http://www.amazon.fr/Console-Nintendo-noire-Mario-Kart/dp/B0...
> GOG.com sells all their games in north american prices because it only has offices in north america. You are buying a product from north america in that case.
GOG.com sells in local currency.
> For example if you buy a $500 cell phone from north america and have it shipped to Europe. You will pay less for the phone but when it crosses the border you pay considerable taxes such that the "deal" is no longer worth it.
Mobile phones are duty-free under CCT (the common customs tariff), so you only pay the local VAT which is 15~25%. Given the phone is probably marked up 30~40% compared to the US, the deal is most definitely worth it, even paying the VAT.
So, a service that costs €1 in Europe, gets the provider €0.8, or $1.05. Import tax is generally the same as VAT as far as I know. Sales tax in the US is usually around 7% -> to a consumer, a $1 service costs $1.07.
This means that if you import a $1 thing from the US to Europe, and don't have to pay shipping, you are saving some 13% of the price as the consumer, and the seller gets 5% less money than the equivalent price in European currency.
That is today. The difference varies, I've seen as high as 1.5 dollar per euro.
This explains why everyone is suddenly asking me to bring them iPads and Macbooks and whatnots because I'm coming back from the US in a month.
There's no import tax on software, on services, on cell phones or on laptops. I could find no such thing on TARIC anyway. It does list consoles with 0% import tax.
Basically, everyone outside the US is screwed in different ways.
We do in the UK, if you're a VAT-registered business.
For example, let's say my business pays $100/month for Web hosting in the US (or even the £40/month I pay to Adobe for Creative Cloud). I then have to "reverse charge" $20 of VAT to my accounts but then also claim back $20 of VAT from the tax authorities.. so it's a net zero result, but we still "paid" it.
I don't believe this applies to regular citizens though, but I could be wrong.. if it does, I know no-one who does it.
It's a real pain for electronics work because you can't buy off the shelf things from the big hobbyist stores.
- 25GB free
- 100GB 1€/m
- 10TB 10€/m
Yes you read that right, its TEN TIMES the space of Dropbox Pro, for the same price.
Im not affiliated or anything, just a satisfied customer.
EDIT: maybe my statement was a bit premature. I was confident Amazon was keeping mirrors, but it seems they only do this in the same region. Dropbox runs its own infrastructure network and uses AWS for storing files, both solely in the US.
Do you have any sort of cite for your claim? Because the link in the comment you're replying to suggests that they store everything purely in the US.
EDIT: it may be that they use EC2 for their infrastructure, but not for actually storing files. But they still use AWS.
If you don't care about this, it's a really great deal, but to me it is a deal breaker.
there is also the fact that this may be faster than dropbox anyways due to hubix being hosted in europe
i imagine there was also high demand for this from the start so limits made sense, but they should start removing them
I've had no trouble downloading at around 3.5Mbytes/sec+ from Dropbox in the UK. I would have definitely went with hubiC otherwise.
Edit: My mistake https://forums.hubic.com/showthread.php?272-hubiC-for-Linux-...!
I'm using this wrapper: https://github.com/puzzle1536/hubic-wrapper-to-swift
- You don't know that Dropbox does.
- You don't know that hubiC doesn't turn data over to their government or whether it's shared with allies.
- You don't know whether either of them have bugs which can be exploited by a MITM – or will in a coming update…
Government spying requires political changes to establish a culture of oversight and accountability. You're fooling yourself if you think that choosing one company over another is anything other than an exercise in distraction when the attacker has the power to compel access with a gag order.
Yeah, so we can just make an educated guess. Plus, Condo.
They've certainly given me no reason to think they don't, and enough circumstantial evidence to believe they probably do. We know for a fact they are targeted by the NSA, because they were specifically mentioned in the PRISM documents as the probable next target for cooperation with that program. So they're on the NSA's radar, and everyone knows it, and they know everyone knows it. In spite of this, a few months later, they bring onto their board Condoleezza Rice, a woman who, while she was in the Bush administration, went to bat for their warrantless wiretapping program a dozen times. She hasn't recanted - she's still a huge fan.
This is pretty much the exact opposite of what you would do to address privacy concerns with your company.
And in the whole time, they've addressed none of this. They spam HN with their stupid blog posts, and when somebody brings up the privacy issues, the poster gets downvoted, and Dropbox goes silent until their next blog post about whatever wonderful technology they've developed to make it easier for the US government to snoop on your data. At the very least, they clearly aren't very concerned about their image with respect to customer privacy, and they don't care if you know it.
It's not like providing a service like Dropbox and providing provable security isn't a solved problem. And they don't do it. Yet they are the biggest player in this market. My, a clean site design and engineering blog really do go a long way.
Anyway, this isn't a court of law. I'm not a judge or a jury and I'm not in a position to put anyone in jail. Requiring that level of proof to decide not to do business with someone, or whether to associate with them professionally, is not reasonable. They have not been forthright about privacy issues over the past year, they have acted in a way that shows they don't regard the legitimate privacy concerns of their users at all, and they have put someone on their board who stands in direct opposition to all that, anyway. That's more than enough.
There was a lot of big talk last year around here about how people who work at the NSA ought to be ashamed, about how "the community" needs to ostracize these people. Soul searching about what kind of person you would have to be to create those kinds of systems, what delusions you would have to buy into, etc etc. Yet that's exactly what has happened at Dropbox - exactly those kinds of people are working there right now - and every week they post some bullshit from their blog and every week this board lines up to congratulate them. You're all a bunch of hypocrites.
Quite true, also very different from the claim I was responding to. We have no reason to believe that they're willingly cooperating beyond what the US government has the power to compel.
> They spam HN with their stupid blog posts, and when somebody brings up the privacy issues, the poster gets downvoted, and Dropbox goes silent until their next blog post about whatever wonderful technology they've developed to make it easier for the US government to snoop on your data.
Alternative theory: people get downvoted for repeating uniformed conspiracy theories.
> It's not like providing a service like Dropbox and providing provable security isn't a solved problem.
Actually, it is. Anyone who understands security can explain to you both the usability tradeoffs which those security changes would by necessity entail and, more importantly, how none of this matters in practice given the threat in question. They could spend a ton of money making their product more secure and harder to use and in practice it would have no effect on a nation-state level threat which can either compromise your system with an automated MITM attack or compel a US company to ship a trojan update.
This problem requires a political solution, not magical thinking about technology.
Not really, you just quoted one part and are acting as though that's my entire claim. If you're just going to strawman my arguments here then, fuck it, I don't want to talk to you. Like I said, it's circumstantial evidence, since their cooperation would have come after the Snowden documents were released, but it's still evidence. We know they're being targeted, they have people on their board who love this shit, and their silence - in stark contrast to most other PRISM targets - is deafening. Again, this isn't a court of law, the burden of proof is lower, and if you're not open about what you're doing, then it isn't unreasonable to assume you're in bed with the bad guys.
This isn't birther or truther or whatever else, conspiracy theory territory. I'm not making any leaps of tortured logic here, so don't paint me with the same brush. It's pretty straightforward and at any rate, all I said initially is that they hand over data to the US government. You appear to agree with me on this after all, you're just giving them more benefit of the doubt with regard to their level of cooperation.
Just to be clear, let's draw a distinction between mere complying with NSLs to the extent required by the law, and cooperating with the NSA on these illegal spying programs. They are not the same thing, and Dropbox is likely doing the latter. Yes, they certainly receive NSLs like anyone else, and some level of cooperation is required by law, but they are also likely to be designing their systems with ease of access for the NSA in mind. It is not unreasonable to think the NSA has automatic access to their data. Other PRISM targets have been pretty open (at least in comparison to Dropbox) about what their cooperation entails, what they are required to do, and what steps they take to safeguard their data. Dropbox has been utterly silent, and that's the most damning thing. Perhaps this would not be a fair conclusion to draw, had they not made the utterly stupid and incomprehensible decision to allow Condoleezza Rice to join their board of directors, but they did, and it is.
No, you are foolish if you think Dropbox is not giving their customer data to the NSA. That's nothing but wishful thinking. Absolutely foolish and naive. Much more so than if, in 2012, you thought the NSA wasn't snooping on emails, et cetera. At least back then the scale of what they are up to would have been something of an extraordinary claim - that's not the case anymore.
You keep talking about circumstantial evidence but there isn't just anything beyond Condoleeza Rice joining the board and, while I'm less than thrilled about that, rich politically well-connected former Standard provosts do end up on corporate boards for reasons other than mass surveillance.
Yeah, but what I want from a cloud store is convenience and long term prospects.
1) Do they have deep integration with iOS/Android apps the way Dropbox has?
2) Will they be around in 5 years?
2/ theyre part of the biggest european hosting company which has been around for 15 years so yes
Personally, I think it's kind of odd to expect that something will cost the exact same amount anywhere in the world.
It might be that the added cost for dropbox to do business in Europe just happens to be very close to the exchange rate, so they just change the currency symbol and call it "close enough".
There are plenty of things that are more expensive in the US than they are in Europe.
The problem is the way the mark-up happens. They're not calculating the difference and marking that up, they're literally just equating US dollars with euros. $99 and €99 might sound similar, but the difference is over 30%. There is no way the additional support costs run that high, so it comes across as just an attempt to pull a fast one on europeans.
I'm sure if they did a proper calculation and gave a realistic number, nobody would complain about the increased cost.
Strangely Dropbox here is showing the price as $9.99.
This is a very simplistic view: product pricing also takes into account things like psychological thresholds (e.g. why it's 9.99/month rather than 10) and the likelihood of a competitor entering the space if your profit margins are too high. Amazon is famous for keeping low margins because they're willing to trade the short-term profits in exchange for making it harder for someone else to enter the space which would hurt their profits long term.
> The simple fact of operating from California means they don't care about operating costs.
Again, simplistic analysis: a business like Dropbox doesn't need to scale their employment at the same rate as they add customers so individual costs matter less than, say, a fast-food restaurant because each employee's work benefits as many customers as you can convince to signup. If you're making a profit on someone's labor their salary isn't as significant as, say, the opportunity-cost of not being able to hire someone at all or hiring the wrong person because most of the top people have been lured elsewhere. Being in business means weighing all of those factors not just looking at a single number and trying to lower it.
Apple lets me pay 699 Euro (http://store.apple.com/de/buy-iphone/iphone5s) in Germany vs 649$ (http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone5s) in the US.
This also accounts for different prices in different European countries; e.g.: the cost of making business is very high in Italy (high salary taxes, high network costs, impossible to fire/sack people, etc.) so they make their products cost more in Italy to account for the additional costs of running operations there.
There's no Apple retail or marketing in Belgium.
It might seem silly but that's the reason I cancelled my Spotify account, I didn't want to pay a 'European' premium. I hate it when they check from which country your creditcard number is - Netflix is nice that they allow you to register in a different country with a VPN & don't check the credit card country.
The Internet doesn't make companies immune to taxes
The bad news is that you'll have to use a VPN to pretend to be from some other country (US) in order to get some of the shows not offered in your own country (Germany).
The good news is that you can use a VPN to register for Netflix (and pay less!) and get the same content as you would get if you registered in Germany.
The last time I checked some Netflix features (watch list?) were disabled if you are 'traveling' outside your region.
Say 100 AUD for a game. That's roughly 70 euro (which is the cost of a new PS4 game in Ireland). The median household income in Australia is 66k (AUD) or 47000 euro. The only source I can find for a median income in ireland states it at around 27000 euro. The purchasing power of an Australian in that case is far higher than an Irish person for instance.
These links have the country's median household disposable income listed in the first paragraph.
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/ireland/
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/australia/
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/germany/
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/france/
http://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/fill-in-the-blank-here-or-just-click-on-a-flower/vs.
http://store.apple.com/de/buy-mac/macbook-pro
Same concept. You can't have the price of good fluctuating all the time in Europe because the relationship between the dollar and euro have changed. They fix the price, it accounts for VAT and sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.
In Dropbox example both include VAT. You can see this tendency clearly in digital games. When I worked with games pricing for MacOS, I asked why such a huge difference? Boss replied: "It is the easiest to force Europeans into premium costs".
There is even a chrome extension which shows how much a game costs in different countries on Steam website:
Buy Sid Meier's Civilization V
US: $29.99 (18.04 GBP)
RU: 249 pуб. (4.01 GBP) (78% )
CIS: $14.99 USD (9.02 GBP) (50% )
BR: R$ 44,99 (12.11 GBP) (33% )
UK: £19.99 (11% )
EU: 29,99€ (23.7 GBP) (31% )
AU: $69.99 USD (42.11 GBP) (133% )
-----
Also not long time ago there was an article about Spotify pricing [1]. It simply is a many years ongoing Europe rip-off.
There may be differing costs for payment processing too, and if they have any sort of tech support and documentation there will be larger internationalisation costs in Europe too.
These things are unlikely to explain all the difference (probably not even close to half of it) but we need to consider these thing to make sure we are being fair when shouting "rip off!".
Do you have a source for that? According to this [1] Europe has by far the cheapest bandwidth in the world
[1] http://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-worldAlso, regarding i18n for Europe: most of the time, it is localized only for FIGS (France, Italy, Germany, Spain). Other 20 or so (for EU, not Europe) countries get shown a finger. So why should they pay for that?
On internationalisation: fair point on those that don't get the effort, though some effort being made is better than none.
Never seen less, always seen more. Significantly more. Take the top-of-the-line MBP without options, 2500€ is $3286, the german VAT is 19%. So a VAT-including US price would be $2975. There's a 10% ($311) surcharge for living in Germany.
http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=5a3c6bfb-8d58-...
The Euro has never gone below $1.17, and has averaged at around $1.32 since Dropbox launched in 2008.
> it accounts for VAT
Dropbox don't pay VAT in the EU. https://www.dropbox.com/help/971
EDIT - Just found this, which suggests it's up to the company themselves to decide in which country the service is being 'consumed', and they need to store evidence which shows how they make that decision. http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/news/one-stop-shop.pdf
EDIT: If some of the evidence above 'conflicts' with the other, e.g. UK fixed landline but a German credit card billing address, then more evidence will be required until the merchant is satisfied as to the customer's precise location.
Most goods are typically more expensive in Europe than in the US for all kinds of structural reasons. Transport costs are higher, labor costs are higher, power and real estate costs are higher. It just costs more to do business over here. The first time I went to the states I was shocked at how cheap _everything_ seemed to be.
I get that one needs to adjust with local regulations,the cost doing business,localisation,... but still 1$ != 1€. (a few years ago, 1€ ~= 1.50$ , so much that people just flew to USA to buy expensive Apple gear,and it was still cheaper than paying the € price).
Granted, they still hike up the prices further in the EU and other markets, Australia being the most egregious example.
All of that would've been avoided if I could've just paid Dropbox $30/mo, but I guess I'm glad they priced themselves out by trying to force me to pay for 3 users that I'm not going to have for a long time.
Nothing will replace my Synology and the amount of services it gives me.
I already have two that backup each other. Best purchase of the year :)
I only use a non-US Apple ID to download region specific apps: banking, local TV apps, etc.
Dan Ariely has some good examples of this in his talks/books.
This article is a perfect example. It certainly doesn't boost my opinion of dropbox.
But whenever someone points out weird pricing and gets excited about a "great deal!", I usually have to check and think - is it really weird? Or is this entirely what is meant to happen?
Should it say "/month" on Google Drive as well? Because otherwise, if those prices are correct then Google Drive is a lot cheaper, but the article implies that it has the same price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dormant_Commerce_Clause
"The central rationale for the rule against discrimination is to prohibit state or municipal laws whose object is local economic protectionism, laws that would excite those jealousies and retaliatory measures the Constitution was designed to prevent"
I was under the impression it's a legal requirement to show the inc VAT price. (And, show it as the most-prominent price -- no trickery like showing exc VAT bold, and inc VAT in fine print.)
http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/buy/choose_edition.jsp?license...