I've found Dropbox to be notorious with this. Their business plan used to be only $150/yr (Fine Print: you pay minimum 3 seats.) That magically changed to five seats at some point and now the $150/yr suddenly shows up as $750/yr auto-renewed and almost impossible to cancel.

How is it impossible to cancel? Are cloud services becoming modern equivalents of gym memberships? Do you have to fax them?

It was a manner of speech. There was no way to get out of the 2 extra magically added seats, even though you agreed to 3, you pay for 5 because they changed their minimum seat policy. I spoke to customer service over and over and they wouldn't even point me to the agreement I signed...just the agreement on their website (the new one.)

The Adobe Cloud suite certainly is. It took me nearly an hour and a half on customer support to cancel my subscription after it autorenewed without my consent. They tried to charge me a full year of service as an early termination fee, as though they were a 90s cellphone carrier.

Protip for anyone else in this situation: The only way to make the cancellation happen without the fee is to repeat "I need to talk to your supervisor" to the drone on customer support, no matter what they try to tell you about not being able to waive the fee. They will never, ever connect you to a supervisor, but they will eventually waive the fee before hanging up on you.

Is there not an alternative to Dropbox that offers better service for the same if not lower cost? I understand that they could pull the same bait and switch on you but maybe there are providers who wouldn't do that or grandfather you in.

I eventually completely terminated the account and moved to Google Drive. I got lured into DropBox because I was an editor to a book that required DropBox to access manuscripts.

The way they were set up, I ended up having to upgrade to a business user given the shared file sizes I was editing (had something to do with the book publisher being on a business account as well.) I ended up paying more for DropBox than I even made as an editor. Brutal.

It felt like a mobile phone contract: seemingly inexpensive, sneaky, convoluted, and before you know you have a gigantic bill committed to for the year.

That is why i cut the cord on my cable tv. I dont understand how companies can accept the ill-will of bait-and-switch tactics -- is it really more profitable than an upfront deal where each party feels it was an honest deal? I mean, I dont mind paying...but I want know know what i'll be paying and decide accordingly. Cable TV is a virtual monopoly, but DropBox is not and I dont know how they can deal with ill-will from former customers, once bit twice shy.

Host your own Nextcloud on a NAS, and have the most popular files synced? Be sure to make proper backups. On the short term, it will be expensive, but the investment will pay off.

I'm also using Stack by TransIP. 1000 GB for 0 EUR/month, with e.g. offers of 1250 GB for 2,50 EUR/month. TransIP is by made by the same people as bunq (its Ali Niknam's first successful company)

Intention was to set up next cloud on a rock64 talking to my nas as backing store - but it turned out more difficult than I originally intended, might do it all on AWS instead - still not sure and didn't have time to try again

I use mega.nz, I don't know how it compares but I am very happy with it.

That's the issue with using cloud services... what used to be your data is now their data.