If you just focus on storage, yes, Dropbox is more expensive.
But this is kind of like saying iOS is just an expensive closed variant of FreeBSD.
Since I'm not drawing a salary from Dropbox's marketing division, I'm not going to go in depth here but I'll just say that Dropbox can be used easily and efficiently by normal people who have never seen a command line. Whereas your home brew python+rsync scripts can only be used by nerds like us.
But this is kind of like saying iOS is just an expensive closed variant of FreeBSD.
Since I'm not drawing a salary from Dropbox's marketing division, I'm not going to go in depth here but I'll just say that Dropbox can be used easily and efficiently by normal people who have never seen a command line. Whereas your home brew python+rsync scripts can only be used by nerds like us.