One of Dropbox's biggest disadvantages for "teams" is the way it handles transitive sharing. If I share "Folder A" with Alice, then she can re-share it with Bob without my permission. I can see that she has done this through the web UI, but I'd have to explicitly look at the list of users with access to the shared folder.
Reading the "Dropbox for Teams" FAQ, I don't see if this problem has been fixed. It seems pretty essential for a lot of "team" functionality.
Yes, email works the same, but there is a small difference in persistence. Probably the folder you shared with Alice will be used for multiple files in the future, while an email is probably used to mail a single file or just a few files.
Okay, as soon as I note that Alice shared the folder with Bob, I can stop using it.. but what's the point in that?
If Alice has access to files, she can share them through any means with anyone she likes (email, another file-sharing service, etc.). I guess you're just suggesting that Dropbox make it a bit harder to do so through their service, but the actual problem is unsolvable and requires some mutual trust in your team.
Suppose I'm on a team with Alice, and I share a folder with her. Bob is not on our team. Alice can share one of my folders with Bob without my consent. This is a problem (consider dealing with temporary employees, contractors, and so on).
In addition, some teams really need separation of knowledge. Perhaps I have some financial or contract files which most of my employees should not read, but I want to share them with my accountant and my lawyer. This feature reeks of "enterpriseyness", so I understand that Dropbox probably doesn't want to deal with it, but it is valuable to small businesses as well.
And if you were using paper Alice could photocopy the document and hand it Bob. The answer to this problem is Alice needs to know who this information can and cannot be shared with. If she isn't capable of that these permissions won't help anyways.
There is a difference between the effort of photocopying individual documents and sending them along one by one, and getting them automatically synced to my competitors.
Just because an employee can copy out all files does not make it acceptable for software to re-share out confidential data without so much as sending a notification to the owner. There's no such thing as perfect security, but raising the bar and making malicious behavior more difficult is not a bad thing, especially when it improves the UX.
Sure, she can do that if all she wants to do is copy it once.
But what if the folder's contents are frequently being changed and she wants to keep Bob abreast of them? If files in it are being changed, and new ones are added?
Then she has to make the effort to track changes and repeatedly email them to Bob.
It's a matter of the amount of friction involved, and there can be a big difference in friction between being able to share-by-copy things and just giving access to the folder.
Yes, Bob has full access. Dropbox does not support read-only sharing.
The nightmare scenario is: (1) Alice re-shares my folder with Bob, and I don't know about it. (2) I don't have the "preserve modifications infinitely" option turned on in my Dropbox account. (3) Bob starts to make malicious changes to my files. (4) I discover this more than 30 days later, which means I can't recover the original files.
Dropbox is the absolutely easiest cloud storage service out there, that's certain, and I'm sure many people will find this a fair package with a fair price. But I suspect most teams of up to 5 people will find this price way above the opportunity cost of setting up and getting used to a different cloud storage service.
It bears repeating: I'm not saying it's a bad package, and it would be foolish of me to assume that the market will perceive this price the way I did. But I do think they should have started offering something simpler and cheaper, and worked their way up to plans like the one they just launched.
Don't think of it as $795/year. Think of it as $13.25 per user per month.
And it comes with 200GB per user and the unlimited version history feature turned on, so this is actually cheaper than five 100GB personal pro accounts ($19.99 per user per month) and it comes with twice the storage and the Teams features! A bargain!
The only remaining question is why Dropbox presents the data as they do. Perhaps they did some A/B testing? My hypothesis would be that individuals and companies simply think of prices in different units. I predict that the discussion here on HN will bear this out: Someone will complain about $795/year but be happy to pay $13.25 per month. ;)
So, I just saw several nice talks about A/B testing, one of which was by our very own patio11.
And the way A/B testing works is that you have to take the data. Hypotheses are just hypotheses. They can be wrong! They can be really wrong! The data will surprise you sooner or later.
Here's a hypothesis: If you put up this chart instead of the one that is there:
2GB: $9.95 per month
100GB: $19.95 per month
200GB plus Teams: $13.25 per month per user, min 5 users
Here is what might happen:
A. On the margin, people with very small companies will tend to buy more Teams subscriptions.
B. However, that effect may be partially canceled out by the large companies that are subliminally turned off by a page that mentions only monthly pricing, not other kinds of pricing. Monthly pricing is great for individuals with credit cards, but company purchasing departments can work... differently. It might in fact be much easier to buy a year at a time than a month at a time just because of the administrative overhead and the culture of purchasing departments, and you'll absolutely have to use purchase orders and invoicing and get approvals, and if the vendor isn't set up for such a thing the whole process will be a huge ball of red tape, and gosh look at the time let's go out for lunch and talk about Dropbox tomorrow, or maybe next month...
C. Meanwhile, some of your potential 100GB customers will be furious that they are being charged so much money! They will stomp their feet and emit furious tweets and threaten to hold their breaths until they turn blue unless they get the $13.25 price.
D. And other potential 100GB customers will look at this and say "hey, bulk discount!". And they'll figure out how to band together with four trusted friends, and pull together a year's worth of cash at once, and buy a Teams account instead, and whoops now Dropbox is making less money on one Teams account than five 100GB accounts.
...and thus I wouldn't be too surprised if the results of A/B testing say: Leave the pricing page as it is.
...or, maybe Dropbox didn't actually test this page, and the more-straightforward hypothesis is actually the one that is right, and they could make even more money by switching to all-monthly pricing. ;)
> D. And other potential 100GB customers will look at this and say "hey, bulk discount!". And they'll figure out how to band together with four trusted friends, and pull together a year's worth of cash at once, and buy a Teams account instead, and whoops now Dropbox is making less money on one Teams account than five 100GB accounts.
Wow, this is actually a great idea. I should do this with my friends.
Having a seemingly higher price might actually also make big businesses take a look at it more seriously. At something like $13 a month it's easy to overlook and aim for something that appears seemingly more big business ready.
I was thinking the same thing. I work for a services organization in a huge IT environment, and we do everything by the month.
But in this case, Dropbox is competing with people who are going to buy a Windows server to host files. And $795 is cheaper than a server+windows+vpn+...
I think their reasoning is they want people to commit to a full year rather than one month. I agree it's not a good way, really.
They should start with $15/month and suggest $795 yearly for discount.
That's actually a very good point. If they presented their plan the way you just laid out, I wouldn't be so ill impressed with it. I still think this plan isn't for me, and I still think they should've been more flexible with the package and pricing, but it makes a bit more sense now that you put it this way!
One limitation of non-team accounts is that you can't easily run multiple accounts on one machine. (It's possible with some hackery involving multiple OS user accounts.) I would hope that Dropbox for Teams makes it easy to run the team account in parallel with a personal Dropbox account.
This is inaccurate, isn't it? The whole point of working in teams is to share files. Any file that is being shared with everyone is being counted against everyone's space. At least that's my understanding of how Dropbox works based on sharing a few folders with friends on free accounts.
Yes we initially did that, bought a 50gb account and shared that folder with everyone, but it counts against their free 2Gb shares - so everyone needs their own 50Gb plan
I'm part of a small team using Dropbox right now and yeah, this was a killer. We're living inside the 2G free limit at the moment, waiting vaguely on expense approval. It's not even the amount, it's that it lives right between the "just do it" level (e.g. $30/mo on someone's credit card for EC2 hosting) and "management-visible priority" ($4k for development boards).
It's simultaneously too much for me to do on a whim and not enough for my superiors to care. Drop it to $35 and bill it monthly and we'd buy it in an instant.
Google Docs offers ca. 1 GB for free, and sells storage upgrades of 20 GB at 5 USD/year. That means prices match at about 3 TB.
So on the one hand, you have DropBox with unlimited storage and a limited, upgradeable number of users. On the other hand, you have Google, with limited, upgradable storage, and unlimited users.
If only Google's storage was a bit more usable. (Also, I have a hunch an AWS-based solution may be cheaper depending on some other variables.)
Like I said, the problem is not so much the package and price as it's the fact that it's the only package they're offering right now. I see very few use cases in practice for unlimited storage and limited users.
EDIT: s/unlimited storage/200 GB per user/ where applicable
200GB x 5 users (what Dropbox gives you) would cost $1950 per year on Jungledisk ($4 + 190gb*$0.15 per user). In practice, Jungledisk could be much cheaper since you only pay for what you use on Jungledisk. But you would have to do the math for your teams expected usage.
I wonder if making it monthly instead of yearly would reduce some of that sticker shot. Also, it would probably be easier for small teams to signup because they wouldn't have to scrape together as much cash up front.
Don't wanna be the devil's advocate, but wasn't this around? I remember seeing this back in February, or a business offering very like it (can't remember if it was branded "for teams"). What am I missing?
I'm curious what sort of situation you have where you trust a user enough to have a copy of a particular directory tree, with the ability to copy it elsewhere and edit it, but you're concerned about them being able to make changes to it.
Huh? Have you ever worked on a shared document before?
To an end-user, the directory tree is a system of record. Many types of files need to "freeze" at a certain point in time -- say a letter that needs to be crafted by multiple people, or a budget worksheet.
In the case of the budget sheet, I don't mind if you copy the file and change some numbers to figure things out -- you're on the Team, after all. But I may mind if you decide to modify a file after we have a consensus that it is "done".
Is that a serious question? I often trust users enough to read my stuff, but not to change it. I feel like I'm in some kind of alternative universe when you ask me a question like this. Access control is basic file system stuff, and has been forever. My understanding is that DB can't coordinate access control across the platforms that it supports. I don't understand why they can't build their own access control layer.
Wrong. If I share a document with another person who is only supposed to read it, and that person deletes it, how long before I notice it's gone? What if that person edits the document? Will I ever notice?
Saying that access control is unnecessary for Dropbox "for Teams" is absurd. Here's an easy example: My law partner and I share our documents via Dropbox. I want him to see my docs, be able to read them, save new versions, etc. I don't want him to be able to change my directories.
No, and I don't think they ever will - they took long enough to implement Selective Sync. They'd rather have a product that can be seen as 'simple', than one that could have users ask "why can't this person see my files?".
Good point, and I think Dropbox can remain simple by default. It could then support an additional "advanced sharing" feature. This would allow exactly two extra flags per shared folder, per user: (1) share read-only, and (2) share non-transitively. This should allow sufficient granularity for most access-control use cases out there.
Anyone who doesn't understand what this means wouldn't use the "advanced" sharing features, and many more small businesses would be able to start using the product.
It doesnt. And this has been a deal-killer for me for a long time. They'll just tell you that you can use TrueCrypt if you want client-side encryption.
Do you guys have APIs? I provide consulting at a semiconductor company and I am currently looking into helping them drive product requirements for selling subscription-based software online (optimized for their hardware).
Most hardware companies don't know software and most software companies don't understand hardware. I am interested in finding out whether we could develop something together out of this...
I'm that case (my Dropbox folder would almost fill up my hard drive, oh the joys of solid-state drives). You can either:
a) use Selective Sync to only synchronise a few folders onto your computer, such as syncing the important documents folder but leaving the gigabytes of videos folder, or
b) have Dropbox throw an error at you and stop downloading files when it runs out of room.
I am probably being ignorant but why is sharing files among a team such a big thing? I understand the consumer side of things but the enterprise should already have at least one server and every desktop OS out there has support for NFS or some such variant. Why do I need dropbox?
Half of our team work remotely but even in the office we use DropBox because it means we can use the one platform to share internally amongst local + remote team members AND to clients.
It's super easy to setup and you don't need to be technically minded to use it. Everyone understands the folder concept.
A) I am a huge Dropbox fan (I stopped by to see their office when I was in sf a few months ago).
B) the price for teams does seem a bit steep for many small businesses certainly businesses that only have 5 users.
C) This is old news. Nothing new to see. Why was it posted?
Sorry, it wasn't clear to me from this link that it was moving out of beta to open.
And the pricing now seems generous (1 TB to start). I wonder how long they can sustain that price. I'm worried that they might be biting off more they can chew with the unlimited offer. In beta, wasn't it 350 GB?
200 GB per new user, at $125/year per user, works out to $0.052/GB/month. Amazon S3, which Dropbox uses, charges $0.037/GB/month at scale. And that assumes that people use 100% of the storage they pay for, while most people don't actually run anywhere near capacity all the time. That also ignores compression and de-duplication.
there should be a variable option where you can trade users for storage. i.e. i want 10 users sharing 500gb, or 20 users sharing 250 gb.
Dropbox for teams never attracted me not because of the storage size, rather it was the high price to add users.
2. The pricing page is confusing, it looks as if there are two Dropbox for Teams plans, but really they're just comparing it to standard Dropbox.