Since Dropbox only does one-way access for people without an account, I assume they saved 25k by distributing paperwork, not receiving.

This implies they've been wasting almost $5,000 per week because they didn't find a content host / run an FTP / frickin E-MAIL the stuff.

What. The. (technological) Fail. You'd think they'd look into something like that a little earlier, as with a bit of setup an FTP host can be essentially as easy.

edit: hell, just use a Google Docs form, that handles distribution and filling it out and combining the results.

I think that's the point of Dropbox. Setting up FTP isn't as easy. Dropbox is so friendly people use it in lieu of more complete, cheaper solutions.

Setting it up - absolutely. Using it once it's in place - pretty close.

I don't expect them to set it up themselves. Just to hunt someone down and pay them a couple thousand to solve their ridiculously expensive problem.

I agree - FTP requires servers to be set up etc. In most corporate environments that can take a long time (for good reasons, you don't go changing perimeter firewalls without some kind of change control) - much easier for everyone to install Dropbox and start sharing stuff in minutes.

Google docs has an API, they also have folders. http://code.google.com/apis/documents/overview.html

I've used Google docs folders for team projects that include file types other than those used for documents, it simply 'stores' it in the folder along with revision history.

Is any weekend hacker thinking what I'm thinking?

For a company that isn't very tech savvy (which may be the case for a company distributing so much papers around) dropbox provides the benefit of being dead-simple.