> I think Dropbox is leaving money on the table with the current pricing structure.
I've long thought the same thing, both on their personal and business accounts.
On the personal side, the free 2 GB account isn't quite enough for my needs but 100 GB is waaaaay more than what I'd use.
> IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition ...
I'd happily pay that. Hell, I'd pay $5/month for, say, 20 GB. Realistically, I'd rarely use more than 10 GB.
It's the same story on the business side. My small team of eight would love to use Dropbox but, again, it's not a huge amount of storage that we need -- 10 GB would likely be more than we'd ever use. Instead, it's the ease with which we can all share that 10 GB of files that I'd happily pay for.
That 10 GB of storage would cost us $120/mo. (it could be as low as $80/month, but we could/would use those extra features so I'd go for the higher level).
Granted, $120/month isn't a lot and it would be much easier to justify if we were going to come close to using the whole 100 GB of storage. Since we effectively need to be able to easily share the contents of a small USB flash drive, though, $120/mo. seems a little outrageous.
At the very least, it seems that "per-user" isn't the best option in all cases and that other methods of charging would be a better fit. For example, there are a few non-technical people in our office that we might consider adding. They would rarely need access to any of the files we'd store on Dropbox but it might be nice to have them as users "just in case" -- but not for $15/user/month.
In our case, Dropbox would quickly gain us as a customer if we could instead pay based upon the amount of storage we use (it seems ironic that this isn't an option, considering storage is likely one of their highest costs). We would, for example, sign up today if there was a "$1/GB/month regardless of number of users" option.
As an added bonus, our daily use of Dropbox would likely result in us recommending it to many of our customers who would also sign up (if they could also pay based upon storage and not the number of users).
I've long thought the same thing, both on their personal and business accounts.
On the personal side, the free 2 GB account isn't quite enough for my needs but 100 GB is waaaaay more than what I'd use.
> IMHO I think that a personal Dropbox account (with no business features) for $5/month for 100gb would kill competition ...
I'd happily pay that. Hell, I'd pay $5/month for, say, 20 GB. Realistically, I'd rarely use more than 10 GB.
It's the same story on the business side. My small team of eight would love to use Dropbox but, again, it's not a huge amount of storage that we need -- 10 GB would likely be more than we'd ever use. Instead, it's the ease with which we can all share that 10 GB of files that I'd happily pay for.
That 10 GB of storage would cost us $120/mo. (it could be as low as $80/month, but we could/would use those extra features so I'd go for the higher level).
Granted, $120/month isn't a lot and it would be much easier to justify if we were going to come close to using the whole 100 GB of storage. Since we effectively need to be able to easily share the contents of a small USB flash drive, though, $120/mo. seems a little outrageous.
At the very least, it seems that "per-user" isn't the best option in all cases and that other methods of charging would be a better fit. For example, there are a few non-technical people in our office that we might consider adding. They would rarely need access to any of the files we'd store on Dropbox but it might be nice to have them as users "just in case" -- but not for $15/user/month.
In our case, Dropbox would quickly gain us as a customer if we could instead pay based upon the amount of storage we use (it seems ironic that this isn't an option, considering storage is likely one of their highest costs). We would, for example, sign up today if there was a "$1/GB/month regardless of number of users" option.
As an added bonus, our daily use of Dropbox would likely result in us recommending it to many of our customers who would also sign up (if they could also pay based upon storage and not the number of users).