Seriously. I am still surprised that to this day none of the big players can compete at Dropbox’s level. Not even Apple can make iCloud “Just Work™” the way Dropbox’s client apps and service work.

As a customer I use Dropbox because of how well it works, not because of its $/GB.

Not surprising. Apple's main business isn't building a file syncing service and while they're a much larger corporation I'd bet that Dropbox has more resources dedicated to its core product compared to Apple's iCloud file syncing offerings.

If Apple iCloud worked as well as Dropbox, I’d switch in a heartbeat.

I think the true reason you don't see too much fierce competition, is because of little profit you can make off of offering a raw storage, even with awesome client.

Even the almighty Dropbox alone may never be profitable...

https://qz.com/1214822/dropbox-is-filing-for-a-500-million-i...

But Dropox? Always works great. Always. Never had a problem. So I use them more and more. Too bad I can't encrypt my entire Dropbox like, say, Spideroak but oh well.

You might give gocryptfs [1] a try, with it you can keep [part of] your content encrypted in Dropbox.

[1] https://nuetzlich.net/gocryptfs/

That makes no sense. That's like saying a restaurant won't server a single to somebody, because they serve the best steak! Families are a good example where Dropbox are pricing themselves out (I ended up up going with pcloud because I couldn't justify paying Dropbox for all that space we don't need).

If you want a pay per GB service, setup a S3 account (or similar) and get one of the many decent frontends to it. Its what I do.

My personal use case involves files stored on a NAS, which is accessible via VPN and any client with a file browser (so, basically every platform). NAS is backed up via rclone to cloud storage. Its not sync, but I dont really want files synced to all my devices.

I think $10 for a windows/mac/linux desktop app, $5 for a android/Ios version. (Maybe get all versions for $20)

You drop in an S3 or Azure storage key, it lists the files, create containers, lets you upload/download to whatever device you are on at the time.

Not necessarily a dropbox killer since you'd have to have a cloud storage account and no how to use it, but it would definitely serve a certain niche.

Stated another way, very roughly, at most 33% of your money went to storage. The real number is probably lower than 33% because the 33% includes support, but let’s use 33% for simplicity.

That means of $100 per year for the 1 TB plan, very roughly[2] $33 is spent on storage. If one wanted to ask “How much less would it cost Dropbox to provide me with 250 GB than 1 TB?” the answer is probably at most 75% of $33 [3], or about $24.

So, if your argument is that Dropbox should offer a 250 GB plan that incorporates their decrease in cost, that 250 GB plan would be priced at about $76/year, not $25.

(These numbers may be a little off because the S-1 doesn’t have per-plan COGS, but they probably aren’t far enough off to change the conclusion. Maybe it’s $70 or $80, but it’s not $25.)

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Dropbox add a less expensive plan, but I’m guessing it would be 10 or 25 GB, not 250, and thatthe plan would be significantly less profitable than their current consumer plan (that is, they’d intentionally ignore the conclusion above). IMO, they’d do so because they thought enough subscribers to this new plan would (a) upgrade to the bigger plan (or business service) eventually, and (b) stay on the free plan forever otherwise. This plan’s entire purpose would be to get users used to paying for something.

1: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1467623/000119312518... page F-4

2: This is inferring based on company-wide COGS and revenue, even though COGS almost certainly varies by plan.

3: In practice, the decrease in COGS is probably less because the average usage on a 1 TB plan will be much less than 1 TB.

However I don't think storage is really their concern, their product is the syncing capability, the apps on all devices, Dropbox Paper etc.

Additionally I'd be really interested in knowing what % of paying customers actually use their 1TB allowance, or even half of it. This is probably where the majority subsidise the cost of the "whales", like at an all you can eat buffet

Donate it to the FSF, or EFF or Wikipedia or something. Otherwise this sounds like “I’m cheap; give me a discount”.

Not wanting to pay is fine. Complaining about it in this manner is cheap.

Imagine if airlines only had first class tickets, would it be cheap to say "plz sell me a cheaper ticket with less leg space and alcohol"?

The cost for dropbox to host your 10MiB vs 1TiB is likely the same. Those numbers are so small, the fixed costs of the infrastructure (engineers, hard drives, networks) is way higher than the difference in storage space.

I understand there are reasons to focus on "Entreprises", but still...

The reason is not the focus on enterprise. It is that most of their competition makes money on other products (Google - Ads, Microsoft - Windows/Office, Apple - Hardware), so they can sell storage at cost price or even as a loss-leader.

You want to pay $2-3 for a few hundred GBs of storage space. But this is highly redundant storage, generally requires plenty of bandwidth, and they need to hire developers to improve the Dropbox backend and apps. Oh, and throw in support for some customers. Obviously, charging only $2-3 per month would be a terrible business choice.

I don't pay 10 Euro per month for the storage. For me the product is the absolutely stellar sync (with LAN sync, partial file sync, etc.), combined with wide platform support (including Linux), the file request functionality, and the fact that they are not in the business of selling my private data. I have paid for Dropbox a couple of years now and I am using 'only' 290 GB. I would still use Dropbox for 10 Euro for 500GB and probably even 10 Euro for 100GB.

You're asking them to change their services just for you before you've even started paying. Just imagine the headache you'll be to deal with once you feel entitled as a paying customer.

Meanwhile Dropbox has a CLI client for your headless servers.

Is there a reason? I just want to understand.

https://github.com/odeke-em/drive

http://www.syncdocs.com/2011/09/backup-your-files-to-google-...

If you want $/GB, try Backblaze's B2 or Amazon S3.

My only choice is to get a business plan that costs x4.5 as much and provides me with 3 users accounts that I don't need. They're going to force me to switch to a competing provider like GDrive or SpiderOak

I want to support them, but not at 5x the price of competitors.

The fact of the matter is, if Company A doesn't meet their needs but Company B does, they will pay Company B, and no amount of great software, service, and wages for very talented people will change that.