Dropbox is a multi-platform cloud file hosting service.
A few days ago the news broke that Dropbox has made the decision to end its $24 unlimited plan offer, a plan that offered businesses per user per month, called Dropbox Advanced.
For a long time its offer with a storage limit of “all the storage space you need”, It was a great attraction for many, as the goal is to prevent professional users from having to worry about quotas.
Everything seemed perfect and indicated thate could be an excellent product for those who could actually harness the potential offered in the plan, but something that Dropbox did not take into account, is that if you do not stipulate the use well and establish a good use policy, your service can be used for other purposes than those intended.
And is that like any “unlimited” service, problems will always come out by users with bad intentions. A very practical example is with unlimited mobile phone plans, where companies that did not establish or think about the offer well, were forced to withdraw said product or make modifications, and even in the worst case even disappear due to that the situation got out of hand.
Dropbox explained that the reason for this change is due to users abusing the service, using it for cryptocurrency mining, reselling Dropbox storage to third parties, and “unrelated people pooling their storage for personal uses.” “
The advisory reveals that only one percent of Dropbox customers consume more than 35 terabytes per license. Since Dropbox's price list says the Advanced plan is $24/user/month, with a minimum of three users it's possible to store 35TB or much more for $72/month.
Taking advantage of the space to talk about an example of this here in Mexico and also as a space to express my anger and above all my condolences, it was the case of YoTelco, an OMV that had to withdraw from Mexican territory for two reasons.
- One of them is a consequence of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, since a large part of his team was based in Ukraine and Belarus.
- And the other due to bad behavior and use by users when abusing their free phone package for "x" time (generally they launched packages of one month, three months and one year).
I personally was a user of the company during the beginning of the pandemic, since I came across its offer of "one year of free service" and yes, as you read it, "free". At the time I thought it was an advertising strategy with something under the hood, but not for a whole year did I get the benefits it promised without extra things or anything strange and what I liked about the company was its coverage, which no other company could not and has not been able to overcome.
Unfortunately, since YoTelco's departure, I have not found another company that can match or at least compete in coverage in various places where I have no signal. In this way I can understand a little those users who are affected by Dropbox's decision.
I can say that it is better for a company in which you like their services for X or Y reason that is affected by this type of users, to withdraw said service, than to have to disappear because the cost situation simply got out of hand. .
It is so, that Instead of giving users "as much space as they need" like before, Dropbox now caps at 15TB.
Interestingly, the Dropbox alert reveals that the company saw more abusive behavior after other cloud storage services abandoned their unlimited tiers.
Another reason is that Dropbox decided that defining “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases for many customers was not feasible. It was just easier to end the unlimited offer.
“Starting today, customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of shared team storage – enough space to store approximately 100 million documents, 4 million photos, or 7500 hours of HD video. Each additional active license entitles you to 5TB of storage space,” the company states.
Finally, if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link