Dropbox has been clearly making a move towards the enterprise space recently. Seemingly, for the standard reasons, better margins, bigger deals, easier revenue retention, etc.
This is 100% consumer focused. I have a very hard time believing this functionality will be around for the long haul. I simply don't see how this plays into the enterprise strategy.
I actually filled out a survey from Dropbox seemingly years ago about this feature!
I think there are many file types to “sell” other than photos. For example, my Fiance saw someone trying to sell a pre-made wedding planning excel spreadsheet.
How is this consumer focused? It seems to be intended for creators specifically (though perhaps not big corporate ones).
Frankly this one of the few features they've added that I can understand the use of. Other than perhaps the way they've made it vaguely easier to 'ignore' a folder (though there's still at least 2 ways to do so, both somewhat inconvenient).
I think it's chasing a very long tail. There seems to be a tremendous amount of people who have digital goods and accept payment via cash app or Venmo or PayPal and then provide a dropbox/google drive link in exchange. Dropbox isn't not doing anything more than monetizing what already happens and it will help legitimize these transactions by linking the payment and the product.
Apparently, pornographic content is not allowed because it may violate Stripe or PayPal's terms of services:
> Even if content is otherwise permitted by Dropbox’s Acceptable Use policy, if it violates Stripe’s Restricted Businesses policy or PayPal’s Acceptable Use Policy, you may not sell, list, or promote it with the Seller Services. This includes pornographic material of any sort.
Dropbox is already used to “sell” adult content. Creators accept payments on something like cashapp, and then send the customer a link to a shared dropbox folder. It does make me wonder what they will change now that they support that directly, because if the traditional payment processors are involved, adult content will definitely be a no-no.
The reason financial institutions don't like adult content is not because of some arbitrary morality concerns, but rather simply because the adult industry is fraught with fraud, disputes and chargebacks.
Not arbitrary, but morality plays a role because the industry is afraid of public pressure and potential legislation. There's been significant lobbying from elected law enforcement and religious groups. For example:
Take the second campaign linked. It went beyond advocating for the current law to be enforced and also advocated for cutting off morally reprehensible content (such as content that fetishizes racial slurs) from the global financial system. I'm not saying that's wrong, I'm saying that it's a moral judgement.
Well everyone was cheering them on when they were canceling the nazis so I think any notion that payment processors should be neutral is dead at this point.
First of all, a slippery slope is slippy - that doesn't mean you have to slide down it. You can ban deepy objectionable content, without banning mildly objectionable stuff. As evidence, see any country in the world with functioning hate speech laws. There are lots of them.
Second, payment processors / platforms restricting or banning adult content predates the recent resurgence of nazism in america by decades.
Your comment illustrates my point exactly, and I think your attitude is why payment processors will always remain as powerful as they are.
My position is that payment processors should not be the arbiters of what is allowed to be paid for by humans. I think that is your position too, but because you don't like the way I made my argument, you reply with a snarky and dismissive tone and treat me like I'm dumb.
That banks and other payment processors shouldn't be the rulers of the world is what we all must agree on and fight for if anything is ever going to change. As soon as you say "well in this case they should because I like when they do it to people I dislike," you are effectively saying that they should be all powerful, just as long as their moral compass aligns with yours.
I disagreed with your line of thinking and explained my reasons why. I’m not sure where you got “dismissive tone”/treating you like you’re dumb. My intent wasn’t to belittle you personally, but I do have an axe to grind with free speech absolutism.
As for payment company power - I agree they shouldn’t be the arbiters of what is acceptable - but you tried to link people asking them to stop taking payments for nazis to this like one lead to the other which is absolutely not the case.
My point is through well crafted hate speech laws and a functioning legal system we can have both - platforms that ban nazis AND payment processing that isn’t able to influence speech.
The problem is they get influenced by the state. See Operation Choke Point that was an initiative started by Justice Department to help combat "fraud" and "money laundering" and ended up hitting a lot of adult entertainers
I don't know. I am all for businesses having that freedom, but I don't really think banks are normal businesses because there are no other options.
But I do lean towards "no" to your question, because if we say it's ok for them to choose who they associate with, we are implicitly saying it's ok for them to restrict any content they want. But ultimately, I don't know, and I just find it confusing that any regular person would argue for the rights of _banks_.
We are in a weird point in history where for some reason a whole generation of people think “visa not processing porn payments” is some new free speech thing, despite the fact that they have historically never processed them.
Idk what it says that there’s so many hammers looking for nails.
The person who nailed this best for me was Terry Smith, a successful UK fund manager (Fundsmith). He was asked a question at an investor meeting many years ago about why they thought it ethically acceptable to invest in British American Tobacco (unfortunately I can’t find a clip), he simply replied they were an investor and not a moral judge of society or in the market of making ethical judgments. While companies were legal entities that they could legally invest in, and gave good returns to their investors, they would continue to invest in profitable companies to deliver returns for their investors.
It was entirely up to people to disagree, not invest, lobby politicians and alter the laws, etc., at which point the companies wouldn’t exist anymore and they could then no longer invest in them.
It just simply wasn’t his/their job to police companies morally. It’s a bittersweet conundrum - I agree with him wholeheartedly, but also people can/should vote with their feet (money) and refuse to give these companies money if legally they are still allowed to exist and you disagree morally with what they do/stand for.
Unfortunately I can’t find the specific conversation I’m looking for, but the article [1] lightly touches on the subject. [2] is worth watching as he actually delves a bit deeper why tobacco is such a good investment for them how and governments have almost made the big tobacco companies bullet proof as an investment.
We see this all the time now across society - people love seeing western companies with rainbow flags, meanwhile ignoring a World Cup being held in Qatar in a few months under shocking morals, sponsored by same said companies, totally ignoring diversity, etc. because it’s a different market. Different markets have different morals and companies know/play to this. We should call these companies out for their absolute disgraceful hypocrisy.
Really you have two choices - vote with your feet and starve these companies of oxygen (money) wholly to force change, or lobby your politicians. Don’t expect morality from businesses. They only exist for one reason and one reason only - to make profits and return value to their investors. Look at how you can alter that equation and you just might change things for the better.
Ultimately, this is the same line of thinking used by drug dealers and cartels. “It’s where consumer demand is, I’m just going where $ is and supplying a need. They should stop using my addictive product.”
You’ll then say, well, it’s as long as it’s legal. And then you’ve outsourced your morals to the letter of the law, in which you’d be a dutiful Nazi in The Third Reich.
I think that’s what I was ultimately trying to say at the time, but you’ve articulated it far better in one paragraph, than I managed to in five or six.
"It just simply wasn’t his/their job to police companies morally. It’s a bittersweet conundrum - I agree with him wholeheartedly"
And pawn off responsibility to consumers under the current system. I don't absolve people that say "it's not my job, I just follow the $." They still have a moral duty to help their fellow humans and not just chase the bottom line.
I feel like we could categorize people calling for racist violence separately from those choosing to share pictures of their naughty bits, and treat each group differently. Unfortunately there are at least as many influential people who want to ban content they find icky as there are folks wanting to stop modern day nazis.
I would prefer we didn't allow payment processors to categorize anyone, period. It is way too much power. If people want to buy porn, let them. If people want to donate to bail funds, let them. If people want to donate to nazis, let them.
Hah yeah, this was my first thought as well. It seems like it's obviously a primary use case that they won't want to support. I'm surprised they don't mention it on the marketing page.
As a shopify user, you can already build such a system for yourself quite trivially.
From the Shopify organization admin, click Stores. Click Create store. In the Store type section, select the purpose of your new store. In the Store details section, enter a name and an URL.
On hacker news, it is equal plausible that the comment is being downvoted since it is not completely serious, so I will add the disclaimer that:
The purpose of my above comment is to add to the conversation by considering this development on the context of past community response to Dropbox product announcements
Am I the only one to find that dropbox is the only cloud drive that works?
Google Drive is _terrible_ with their "shortcuts", you can't have stuff that is shared with you on your local hard drive. It's been terrible for years.
OneDrive is mostly made for windows and iCloud for Mac.
I don't understand the hate.
I use DropBox a lot and quite like it.
I built a CMS for it and it automatically synced my markdown files on my mac with a linux box running on Vultr. I just save a file on my computer and bloop, my website is updated. It's been working flawlessly for several years.
Dropbox is something we should celebrate. They mainly solve this one problem and do it well. Yes, it’s more expensive than others, but they are also a profitable company. It’s great to have these individual companies, instead of having to get everything from Google/Apple/Microsoft.
I’ve been using Dropbox for years with difficult stuff, like Node projects with tens of thousands file. The sync works and it’s really quick.
Yep, I've tried them all and Dropbox is the only one that I can say works.
- iCloud - simply does not work, trusting your files in here is a fools errand.
- Google Drive - They've change the name 6 times since I've started this comment, and each name changes requires a new download, and each download removes a feature I use. Need third party app for Linux.
- OneDrive - Not so bad, but need third party app for Linux.
I've tried many others like SyncThing (just terrible, people who tolerate this I give them my pity because it is not good software).
I wish Dropbox would just split of products into Dropbox Classic (A folder, that syncs!) and then this new fangled rubbish they keep building to diversify.
> I've tried many others like SyncThing (just terrible, people who tolerate this I give them my pity because it is not good software).
Maybe my use cases are too simple, but why did you find SyncThing a bad software? In my experience, understanding the setup was the difficult part, but that's to be expected when you're used to cloud providers managing that on their end. Apart from that, it doesn't work on iPhone or iPad, the syncs can take a couple of minutes, and that's all the cons I can think of.
The big pro for me is being able to sync files that an overzealous cloud provider might autosanitize without asking.
Regarding Google Drive on Linux, I've tried InSync and it worked so well with a combination of Dropbox+Google Drive+Google Workspaces that I bought the lifetime license. From time to time they do 50% offs, so it's even more attractive. Much better experience than the official Dropbox client.
The SyncThing FAQ states that due to iOS design decisions, a fully functional client is not possible. Last time I checked it, that answer didn't mention Mobius Sync, even if limited it's great to have an iOS client!
dropbox has a special place in my heart because it was the only one offering linux support for a good time.
I have been using it non stop since it was available, and the best thing is that I've completely forgotten about it for years. It's happily churning in the background doing its job, updating itself automatically and not letting me worry about its existence, not a single notification window, and seldomly sending me emails about new services.
Google forsake linux, they already went through a client deprecation on mac, they bug me about getting permissions for the downloads folder they don't need, and it breaks sometimes I boot with an external drive connected, it's a chore to use their software.
Same. I almost exclusively use Dropbox, despite having an Office365 subscription with 1TB OneDrive. I tried moving to OneDrive when Dropbox raised their prices, but gave up after a couple days when OneDrive still couldn’t sync my files. Dropbox just works, no matter the number or size of files I throw at them.
Except that Onedrive sync is sub-par. If you have one computer <-> cloud then it works reasonably well, ignoring file naming issues. If you have several computers that you want to keep in sync it gets hopelessly messy and out of sync real fast unless it's just few files.
I've tried to give OneDrive a chance several times but no more. Dropbox has been only reliable choice for three-four way sync for me.
Since the only way that DropBox makes sense as anything more than a “lifestyle business” is by focusing on the enterprise. The correct comparison would be what they both offer enterprise customers and not my comparison is on the personal side.
The reason I stay with Dropbox is because I share my login with my partner. The benefit here is that we see exactly the same contents in the Dropbox folder, this is something that is simply not possible with iCloud (even the family account), Google Drive, OneDrive or Amazon.
We have Dropbox on our phone so photos are automatically uploaded to it, this is great because we love sharing out pictures. If we were to do this with one of the other services we would have to mess around with photo permissions and 'share' them with the other person constantly. I got iCloud family thinking it would behave like a single folder the family could access but found out it's really just a bunch of individual iCloud accounts with a shared quota.
She can scan a document at home on the Brother scanner that automatically places the file onto Dropbox. I can immediately fill it out or sign it from my iPad remotely, and she will have the modified document waiting for her. This came in very handy when moving houses and having a bunch of paperwork to complete. I can't even imagine how this process would be on another cloud storage provider.
There have been many times where I just want to cancel my Dropbox subscription because the pricing and storage tiers don't suit me but I can't find a suitable replacement.
Dropbox is also terrible toward people who don't want to use their service, in a way that paying users are conveniently unaware of. Someone shares a folder with your free account? That counts against your quota. Once it exceeds your quota, Dropbox will yell at you for exceeding your storage limit, when all you ever wanted to do was view files people have shared. Want to keep a folder available offline on your iPad? Better pay up.
I appreciate them for being an independent company that is doing its own thing in a gradual way. The internet needs more of those. But it would be miserable if they became a major player with their existing contempt towards end users.
This exists because otherwise someone could just create a bunch of alts and share folders with a main account to get infinite storage. If someone just wants to share content, they can share it as a downloadable folder. As in, users can download files or a Zip of the whole folder to their device. That does not count against quota.
This hit me years ago. I had 5 or 6 clients who were all raving about how great and free dropbox was. Each shared files with me, but it put me over my own limit. Each of them were only sharing a few hundred meg, but it put me well over the 1 (or 2?) gig limit, and I had to pay to continue using it to get their files (which was free for them). Left a bad taste in my mouth.
Dropbox sometimes get's stuck for us (very annoying). We pay for google so have free google drive. We pay for office so have one drive.
We use dropbox as a poor persons collaboration tool. About 100,000 files in 20,000 folders. My major complaint - when it gets stuck syncing a quit on the app and restart of the app solves things - so I wish they would do that internally to the app, just timeout and restart whatever is jamming things up.
I do like the app / folders scoped permissions. For apps that play well there is an apps folder, and the app just has access to its own folder in there. A nice integration point for apps to dump files to for users to look at.
Correct, Google Business Plus is 5,000 GB per user. It's pooled, so if you have 20 users, you have 100,000 GB of storage for the team.
Most users use almost nothing so for our use cases google drive has no marginal cost and I've been seeing what I consider positive changes to the google drive story (and maybe speed?)
> you can't have stuff that is shared with you on your local hard drive
What does this complaint mean? You mean Drive doesn't sync down shared files for you to use offline?
On my Chromebook the integration between local files, my Drive files, and Drive files shared by others with me is completely transparent, including local caching of files I've viewed so I can access them again offline, which furthermore includes the directory listings of "shared with me" with the cached and not cached files distinguished by bold or grey names. I can also explicitly mark Drive files as available offline, if I want to manage it manually.
Maybe chromebook does it differently but on macos, google won’t show the content of “shortcut” folders in the Finder app. You have to go on drive.google.com to see the files in shortcut folders (which is how shared folders show up nowadays).
I love Syncthing to bits but I wouldn't say it was comparable to Dropbox in terms of UX and flexibility for e.g. sharing with others or reliability (it gets stuck on syncing files way more often than Dropbox for me.)
How do I create a share link to deliver a commission to someone with SyncThing? Cloud storage has evolved beyond just syncing stuff. SyncThing is great for keeping two or more up to date copies on different computers, but it doesn't do most of the things people do with Dropbox et al.
I need more than the free tier, but I don't need as much as the lowest they offer. $2/month to Google covers all my needs and works perfectly for them. Dropbox is not in competition with the other services for people served well by those lower tiers. There's no hate, just a mismatch between offering and needs.
It's definitely the only cloud drive I haven't had to think about after setting sync up, but since they've added the device limit, and me not needing enough storage for a paid plan, I've moved off them.
I was "waiting for the fonts to load" then I saw the comments here and realized that font was a conscious choice. Ugh.
As others have pointed out, their design seems to have gone downhill, I haven't visited dropbox in a while but I recall them having a very nice and clean design. Now it looks like someone's MVP that was put together in an afternoon.
I think, after iterating their sync technology over and over, they consider it as a "solved" problem. Besides their macOS (kernel modules related) Smart Sync woes, there are not many problems they're facing now. They intentionally keep the Linux client as barebones as possible, but I'd rather not die on that hill today (it's late).
So, they're trying to build an ecosystem around their user's files, so they can both capture more files (growth), and create value from this file trove.
I understand their position, but they're also hurting their own user base who want basic file syncing by ignoring them (e.g. people who want a better Linux client, KDE compatibility, macOS M1 smart sync woes, etc.).
If they solely focus on file sync, there are other competitors coming fast, too (Google is cheap, iCloud is cheap, pCloud is European, etc.), but keeping the integration, performance and features moat is the only sensible strategy for them, at the moment.
I don’t think they have a given distribution at the target audience they need for this. The examples you gave were just a simple upsell or a package deal to their existing audience.
A huge chunk of these digital products sold on the internet today link to Dropbox. So the value add is really them removing an extra step in the process for the creator.
What’s not super well known is that when Dropbox went for a major rebranding/redesign, they did it for growth reasons. I remember many people (here on HN and elsewhere on the web) were horrified about their new design.
But the reason they did it is because they had hit a growth ceiling with their (mostly) engineer users.
So their new positioning was meant to attract a new audience and help the company grow.
This Shop experiment tells me their cloud storage growth has plateaud again and they’re looking for ways to tap into new markets.
I understood the reasons behind their redesign. Same product, different audience.
If I recall, Gumroad worked their employees to the bone then let them all go while the founder enjoyed great PR and profitability.
I think HN at the time wasn’t against the guy so much (the opposite), but that whole incident pissed me off. I hope Dropbox can take away Gumroad market share.
Dropbox Shop is cheaper than Gumroad-- they only pass on the 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction fee from their payment provider. The way Gumroad's tiered fee schedule works, you only get those rates from them if you've sold $1 million worth of product through them.
On the other hand, Dropbox doesn't have anything like Gumroad's Discovery page, so if that's something that you think might drive sales, it might be worth paying Gumroad's higher fees.
This is completely unrelated to their drive business. Feels coherent given Dropbox is probably used for storing the content so people don’t have to move it all to some other website creation company. I don’t know how much this will stick but worth a shot for Dropbox
I once built a shop like this for a client. Just place an image in a folder. Put the price in the file name. Then they wanted more features... each article needs to have an article number, fine add that to the filename too. Different categories, easy just use folders... I thought it was an elegant solution. Then they wanted more functions, and I added more variables to the file name. They eventually switched to full fledged e-commerce software.
My issue with these kind of tools is that like everything in the digital space, there's nothing stopping someone from purchasing say an ebook from me and then uploading it on some website for anyone to download for free.
If I were selling something, I sure as hell would want to lock it down as much as possible, not like sell something behind weaponized share links
Off topic, but I hate, hate the Dropbox design now. It feels like an indie blog, not a place I just want to log onto and get to work. Seems like Dropbox has an identity crisis at this point.
Dropbox lost interest in non-enterprise customers quite some time ago. It kind of makes sense too, since "normal users" are going to use the cloud functionality built into their OS, whether that's OneDrive, Google Drive, or iCloud Drive.
I don't get it either. iCloud does 50GB for $1 and 200GB for $3. OneDrive does 100GB for $2 and 1TB for $7 (which includes Office). Google does 100GB for $2 and 200GB for $3.
The cheapest Dropbox subscription is meanwhile $12 and overkill for most casual users. Maybe it isn't worth it for them to charge lower amounts on a credit card?
I worked at Dropbox briefly, and I asked this too. The answer was basically that they tried it (multiple times IIRC) and every time it ended up being a net negative on their ARR since it siphoned enough of the user base away from their other options. I think, also, the sort of user that uses less than 2TB isn't their "core" customer profile (think photographers, videographers, artists, and musicians).
I was bummed, but for a publicly traded company its a little hard to argue with the logic.
I know many freelancers in creative industries and they would never pay for google workplacw or office. They dont even know how much gdrive or onedrive cost. Yet they all have the 2TB dropbox tier because thats what you get. Thats what everybody gets. And since its the backup of their professional lives they will probably use dropbox forever.
How do you manage files properly with iCloud? What is on the system. What isn’t. Stuff randomly not being on the system. Barely any if at all progress or status indicators.
I don't most of the time. The files in my iCloud files are small documents, and I always have a network connection near me (at least I have my hotspot with me). Hence, I had no problems reaching any file I need so far.
I can parse the state of the files inside a directory pretty quickly with the inline icons, too.
However, I understand your woes. iCloud doesn't work as straightforward as other cloud providers, and makes its own decisions. On the other hand, I agreed with its choices so far.
I don’t use a personal computer for anything outside of work. I’m only accessing my personal files either on my iPad or iPhone. I have a cellular iPad.
I'm in the same boat with you. However, while I'm keeping the subscriptions because they either came with something, or use them to some extent, I'm consolidating to Dropbox and Google drive. Why?
Because I want to use less clients, and don't want to keep track of my files and let them rot. All of the files in my cloud accounts are backed up to local storage, but Dropbox is used to store a lot of files which were on my personal workstation. The reason is, I'll have a life transition and won't have this desktop machine anymore. Hence I need these files anywhere and everywhere.
Having a lot of cloud storage is nice, but mentally keeping tack of files is not.
As a side effect, I can ruthlessly delete files and remove cruft.
They charge as much for business per user as Google does for its highest tier workspace product. They charge more than Microsoft charges for Office 365 (granted that only has 1TB per user rather than 5TB but I doubt many people hit close to that).
Maybe they should be focused on large problems--like the fact that deletes don't currently work properly in Dropbox (you can soft delete things at the moment, but things are not being permanently removed--go into your Trash and try to empty it right now and see what happens) rather than adding unnecessary side features.
I can literally already hear the desperate cries for help from people who have lost access to their Dropbox accounts because they are accused of selling things that violate vaguely worded terms of service.
Lmao at Dropbox. They're forced to claim they're innovating to keep their value up, so they come up with a ton of stuff that nobody wants, completely destroying the reputation of the single simple thing they were initial highly respected for.
>And so he started trolling us a little bit, saying we’re a feature, not a product, and telling us a bunch of things like that we don’t control an operating system so we’re going to be disadvantaged, we’re going to have to figure out distribution deals, which are risky, and sort of a bunch of business-plan critiques. But then he was like, ‘Alright, well I guess we’re gonna have to go kill you, basically.’ Maybe not in those words, but pretty close.
He was right, but he was also years early. It took Apple 5-ish years after that (I’m assuming this conversation was around 2009) to ship iCloud Drive, and then some more years to add things like shared folders (it took them two tries I think). By that point Dropbox was down the Enterprise Hole, but a 10-ish year run isn’t bad for a product, many great products or product categories have had shorter lifetimes.
Actually I understand where they're coming from, but this ecosystem doesn't work with Linux well, and this hurts the utility of the Dropbox a lot, if you have one or more Linux systems under your account.
They don't want to dedicate the necessary resources to keep their sync clients in top shape in recent times. That's kinda troubling.
I've used solutions from other companies, but I kept coming back to Dropbox because ultimately it worked best. The client implementation really matters. Every time they degrade the client experience, I start to ponder moving to something else again. I don't need fancy, I just need it to work every time.
Dropbox does work the best, but some years back they took out their “middle tier” so you couldn’t just pay a few bucks a month, then a year or two after that sharply limited the free tier, took away the public folder, etc. At some point I had to ask myself “is this so much better than iCloud for my personal syncing and an FTP share directory for a public folder replacement,” and realized the answer for me was “no.”
I have friends, mostly musicians, who use them, and it drives me nuts. I'm almost at the point of building a VM strictly for it, I'm certainly not going to install that garbage on my daily-use machines.
I would literally pay them a buck as an annoyance tax each time I have to suck a file out of there, if they would make it painless to do via a browser.
For a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.
The poster seems to be trying to draw a parallel between his comment and an infamous post that he made nearly 15 years ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224), or maybe just to make him feel bad. I personally don’t think the tones of the two posts are comparable at all. His post has been quoted out of context for the last decade or so, though, so it’s not surprising to me. (Ask yourself, what did “app” mean in his comment?)
Several people seem to expect that he would be embarrassed by my comment or regret making it, but it honestly doesn’t bother him at all. I, HN, and even the world have changed a lot in 15 years.
Anyway, he's pretty satisfied with where life has taken him. He's certainly not going to sweat someone combing through his post history in a vague attempt to dunk on him.
Dropbox has been clearly making a move towards the enterprise space recently. Seemingly, for the standard reasons, better margins, bigger deals, easier revenue retention, etc.
This is 100% consumer focused. I have a very hard time believing this functionality will be around for the long haul. I simply don't see how this plays into the enterprise strategy.