I hate to be cynical here, but they're EBITDA profitable, not profitable, and they've been in business for 10 years. I think there are thousands of better examples but they might not be at the scale of Dropbox.

In this case, I'd consider Dropbox's emergence into slight EBITDA profits as not great, but a definitely welcome sigh of relief for a unicorn market full of bullshit.

Of those thousands of examples, which are the closest to Dropbox's scale?

Dropbox has exabytes of data. I'd be very surprised if SpiderOak is storing more than a few PB. Perhaps some SpiderOak folks would care to correct me on this though?

There are some opportunities for real innovation, though. An easy one is de-duplication of identical files to save space (which I have tested that they do). However, I suspect it can be taken much further to gain a competitive advantage against other storage providers, such as de-duping blocks, advanced compression algorithms, etc.

And of course, there's always room for creativity in the hardware and data-centers, and UX.

supporting hundreds of millions of users (and probably tens of millions of paid users) is non-trivial

While support staff definitely increases with users (paid or not), beyond a certain size the number of engineering staff should be largely independent of user count. As long as you are able to run 24/7 ops, manage outages and incidents, scale appropriately, etc. the only variable should be how rapidly you need to build and maintain your software. The rest of the complexity is all handled via automation.

Not to take anything away from WhatsApp, I'm sure they have a few lessons Dropbox could have learned from (Erlang more robust than Python at scale?), but it's really not a fair comparison.

I am not an expert but I agree with you. Follow up question: why is this not more common? why don't other companies emulate WhatsApp?

Their basic service is very good, though. Apart from sometimes using lots of resources on MacOS.

Is a 1TB family plan for $10NZD per month (not $10USD which is like $4000 NZD /s) too much to ask?

Microsoft have a $7.99 NZD per month O365 plan that includes Email and 1TB OneDrive.

I can also buy O365 Home Premium (5 user including thick apps and Skype credit) for less than $10 per month ($99 NZD per year) -- and that's for 5 users.

Microsoft are consistently adding value to their O365 offering, its only a matter of time until they nail the "Dropbox" level of quality on OneDrive and then Dropbox won't be relevant anymore. They need to bring that price point down for the different locales. $120USD per year is just too much.

I have an Office365 subscription that I don't use.

Their OneDrive client is shit and they don't do file version history, which means that files are very vulnerable to mistakes and ransomware.

With OneDrive you basically get exactly what you're paying for.

> Microsoft are consistently adding value to their O365 offering

One way of looking at that is the quality of their offering is so bad that the only way to go is up.

If you objectively analyse their price, Office 365 is in fact overpriced. For example I spent about $20 on Apple's Keynote and it was a one time fee that happened 3 years ago. It's still the best presentation software for me. And personally I have important data, like a big family photos archive, a lot of documents, presentations I did, stuff I found interesting, etc. The cost of losing it would be pretty high.

I'm very frugal in general, but I don't mind paying for email and storage.

I don't know how many people remember just how painful life was BEFORE Dropbox came along and fixed everything...but they were like an oasis in the desert when the beta first appeared.

Failing on that one for me. I hover close to the storage limit, and I receive constant notifications from the software about it. No option to "leave me alone" in the settings.

Another shitty thing they do is, they often have promotions giving you a huge amount of space (10-20GB) but only for a year. They get you to fill up your Dropbox with content you depend on, and after a year, they're like "now you got a week to delete it all or pay for premium!"

Official line from Dropbox is not to use soft links.

I have experienced sync failures on occasion that required restarting.

The problem is that they aren't profitable.