Right. It's not that Dropbox doesn't want to offer less than 50 GB, it's that they don't want to be charging anything less than $10/month. Customers that care about the difference between $5 and $10 per month are not going to make a business rich. You will not get twice the paying audience at $5 than at $10. And it runs into pathological customer territory; statistically in all walks of software and technology, the cheapskates are the greater support nuisance.
And neither are customers paying zero. Personally Im not that thrilled about buying into something where I subsidize a sizable free tier. I love Dropbox, but I can't justify $10 a month for just personal doc storage. Dropbox isnt great for collaborative sharing (becuause you can't have 'shared' space) it isn't a proper backup service (I use crash plan for that) so basically it's personal storage. In that market $5 is all I'm willing to part with.
We use it at my company all the time as shared space. I can't 'share' it to an unlimited number of people, mind you, but I can't imagine a scenario in which I would.
Regardless, it's a pretty good collaborative tool, super for backup of important documents, and yeah, personal doc storage, but as I've spread it out across 6 different PCs, it's a great sync service too.
That said, I'm no longer paying for Dropbox in lieu of Google Drive. Perhaps their cost model is more to your approval?
How do you feel about putting company data on a service like Dropbox which is arguably wildly insecure?
I originally used it for sharing company stuff, and then I read up on their data storage practices and moved my work stuff off there as quickly as I could. The only data I keep on Dropbox now is data I don't care really care about.
By insecure I mean that people at Dropbox are able to look at your data if they wanted to (it's against their policy, but they are physically able to). If they can look at your data then someone who hacks Dropbox can look at your data. This is placing your data at the mercy of the dropbox security team, and the ever mounting threat that the more popular they become, the bigger a target they are.
Contrast that with somewhere like SpiderOak or Tarsnap: all encryption is done on the client side, they have no idea what your data is and no one at the company can find out. This means you get to control your security (picking a secure passphrase etc).
We're using it to collaborate, generally with groups of people. As such, uber-sensitive files tend to not be the types of files we're sharing.
I like Tarsnap in theory, and as a backup solution it's great I'm sure, but it isn't meant to be a competitor to Dropbox for a lot of reasons, but mainly because Tarsnap would suck horribly at collaboration. It's far too private for that sort of thing.
For what it's worth, I've used Encrypted drives on Dropbox, and it works perfectly. It has to sync the entire volume if any one thing changes (for obvious reasons), but that solves the privacy issue. I've used it on the old 20G plan where 10G was encrypted and 10G wasn't, and it worked as expected.
The problem we constantly run into with it in work environments is that any one person is screwed if they don't have enough space for the "shared" stuff, it still all counts towards their usage.
