Dropbox was losing money every year of its existence until 2021.

By design.

If I gave you $250,000,000 to grow a company, and then next year I saw you had $250,050,000 in the bank, then $250,102,000 next year, and so on, I'd be pretty annoyed that I backed you. You have so much money you could be spending on hiring, development, and marketing, and you're instead just slowly chugging along, padding the corporate bank account? What am I paying you for?! Give me my money back.

VC-backed companies that spend more than they earn aren't duds. It's the nature of VC-backed corporations.

They spent it all on storage and on their new spammy looking marketing emails that pester free users to upgrade I guess. I don't recall something really new on Dropbox since they were established.

I am paying Dropbox for storage and will pay them until I die. Rock solid sync and object durability, API access to my storage for my apps, no complaints whatsoever. I don't want new, I want storage I don't have to think about.

Until they die, relatively soon. 100 years from now Dropbox will be a distant memory, but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well.

> but locally mounted FTP directories under version control will be alive and well. [1] [2]

This might matter to you, but it does not matter to me. In the meantime, my life will have been better and my time saved between now and death (certainly less than 100 years from now). That's what the money is for. Time is non renewable. If you have more time and ideology than money, I admit your solution is a better fit for your life and use case(s). Self host if you want, I have better things to do personally vs cobbling together technology that I can buy polished for the cost of two coffees a month. There's a product lesson in this subthread. No business lasts forever, the benefit is the value delivered during its lifecycle. Provide value, and I will happily let you ding my credit card monthly or annually (please support annual plans B2C!) forever. "Build something people want" or something like that [3].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 ("My YC app: Dropbox - Throw away your USB drive ")

[3] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/4D-yc-s-essential-startu...

Self hosted and versioned FTP drives represent true power, like the stone buildings that stand for centuries. A dropbox subscription is the shitty McMansion that falls apart after 10 years.

how to?

Unfortunately, longevity doesn't matter to an economy whose participants surf the cash flow. The shitty McMansion may fall apart after 10 years, but if it lets you earn more than it costs to replace, it's good enough. Sad as it is, a lot of the economy relies on the churn.

In some ways FTP = you own, but Dropbox = you rent. Understandably some like renting more than owning

The goal is not to make money for the most years in a row.

So was almost every unicorn startup. They purposefully aim for growth until its unsustainable, then switch over to exploiting their market position. We may not like it, but the business model is far from novel or unexpected.