Me and my wife ended both ended our Dropbox Plus subscriptions last weekend (after being paying users for five years or so). As a side-effect, my mom also cancelled her subscription (since she was using it to share photos with us).
The primary reasons:
- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.
- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.
- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.
If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.
I'm getting tired of their constantly dropping support for older versions of MacOS (I don't upgrade MacOS often because every new version is a net productivity hit for me), and their upgrader daemon that
A. Cannot be shut off, and
B. Upgrades my Dropbox client whether I want it to or not. Even with Google's very determined auto-upgrader, I finally figured out how to shut it off. Not Dropbox.
Here we go again. Every constant-growth oriented company with happy customers eventually decides to go to war with said customers as a last-ditch effort to extract more revenue, and thus forces them to its competition.
To clarify, when I said, "dropping support for older versions of MacOS" I didn't mean "product still works but you're on your own." That's what most companies do and I have no problem with it. Dropbox doesn't do this. With Dropbox, the client program stops working entirely for no good reason and on arbitrary dates when they think your OS is too old. I find this entirely unacceptable.
That’s a bit harsh. While I understand not wanting to perform a new OS update (at least not immediately) or not being able to (they deprecate old hardware too) I do understand that it’s a matter of resources and that most people are going to be on a handful of your most recent releases, so it makes sense to spend your time on those.
At the same time (most) people don’t actively seek to disable updates for things until something goes wrong. If your app is working on my current OS and filesystem it’s incumbent upon you to recognize that and not automatically push out an update that breaks that.
For something as relatively simple as Dropbox’s original functionality (all files from folder x are synced to their server and every other machine on your account) it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.
> it also seems like a relatively reasonable ask for them to version things and continue to support that functionality for quite a long time.
Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.
There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?
But, yes, basically agreed.
relatedly, I've had dropbox on and off, but felt pushed in to paying for it, and resented that push (and ultimately never did). Had multiple client years ago all 'love' dropbox and wanted to work that way. They all loved that it was 'free', but... when I had to work with 5 of them, each sharing up to their 'free' limit with me, it put me over the free limit in to 'pay up' territory. Not a 'break the bank' amount, of course, but it bugged me that I needed to fork out.
> Or... just don't force an upgrade. Notify me at some point that it might not be 'supported' after a certain date, and subject to data loss, etc. We understand with many other pieces of software that after a certain date, they may still 'work' but we won't get support.
> There's certainly some security risks to deal with there, and perhaps reminders closer to cutoff dates would help?
That was actually my whole point. If you have security updates to push, then push them. An automatic push should not break my existing functionality under normal circumstances. There will always be extraordinary situations where it’s required, and at some point you do have to make the tough call that the hundred people still using something will just have to deal with it... but it shouldn’t be the norm.
>Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years.
Wow. I literally never see UI clutter, because I never log into the site, and only rarely use the iOS apps. DB is mostly just multi-system sync & versioning for me, and in that regard it works GREAT.
Same here, the only UI I see is the green icon next to the file that gives me assurance that it works, and the occasional syncing animation.
However with the price increase and not being even close to hitting even the old 1T limit I think I will be looking for something else, which sucks because I really like the product and have been using it for almost a decade at this point, or more.
The UI got worse when they broke it, what, 4, 5, probably 6 years ago now? It USED to be a menu bar icon with a green check showing it was up to date. Now its just a box. Now when I click the dropdown I can either view a "notifications" or "recent files" tab, neither of which I want. One of my notifications (the oldest of the 3 that show on the screen is A YEAR old. It used to look like an OS X menu. Now it's just some weird list with arbitrary icons spewed all over the screen that's utterly inconsistent with everything else on my system.
Your feedback resonates with me when I think about my experience with nearly every new software I come across. If it isn’t a monthly subscription (or the yearly option where I am ‘saving’ money) being shoved down my throat, more than likely I am being propositioned to pay for features that I simply don’t care about.
One example, Airtable, has paid plans. In order to get the feature I want, I need to upgrade to the second paid plan for $24 per month. I don’t care about the additional collaboration features. I don’t care about having 10gb or whatever for attachments. So tired of this pricing scheme.
One thing that bites me is that a lot of products are marketed at businesses rather than consumers. There are things I’d use for myself or my family, but the pricing is not conducive to that. Leankit is a great example. I’d love to use it, but it would be way too expensive to justify. Basecamp is the same way (didn’t used to be). The additional features that are used to justify the high price are things that only a business would need, and therefore not useful to me.
I get it, selling to businesses is where the money is at (and probably a lot less hassle than consumers). If I ran a SaaS company I’m sure I’d do the same thing. Still irks me that so many things are unavailable due to the high cost.
Unfortunately this is basic business economics. When you want to drive overall revenue, it's often cheaper to boost an existing customer and sell them more stuff rather than go try to find an additional new customer.
I felt similar and the price increase was last drop. I use it mostly to store originals of pictures and video however that also means that they are little bit forgotten.
Whole family is on iOS so after I found out that Apple Photos can merge raw and jpg into single item in their UI, it was no brainer to switch to iCloud and import all the images/videos into Photos and rest of the files into iCloud.
As a bonus I can share storage with whole family in iCloud, which is not possible with Dropbox.
Yeah I wouldn't mind paying less for less storage space, I'm only using it nowadays to keep a live backup of photos I take (also because pulling photos from the iphone onto a windows PC doesn't seem to work anymore?), using only 3.4% of the 2 TB of storage.
I'm considering the same thing and switching to iCloud Drive as my family is heavily invested into the Apple ecosystem. The next versions of iOS and macOS will support shared folders, which was the one thing holding me back.
Also really annoyed about the price change. It seems to me like they know most people don't use the full 1 TB, or anywhere near it, so it's practically meaningless to extend to 2 TB. You really have to want to use all their collaboration tools to make paying $12/mo worth it. Otherwise they're just sucking up more margin.
I recently started paying for iCloud for phone backups because it's so damn cheap, and I don't leave my desktop on (with itunes running) often enough for our phones to backup to anymore.
Only thing preventing me from moving from free Dropbox, is just the hassle. I guess I should. Also, I sync Dropbox to my Synology NAS, but it's not for any purpose other than just having another copy Just In Case.
It has to do with how they use xattrs to manage the syncing. They now only support a single FS on each OS. You could certainly argue that other filesystems have the necessary capabilities, but Dropbox decided to only support ext4. It’s probably the dominant filesystem for Linux, but in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers.
>in a community as diverse as Linux, that means leaving out a lot of other potential customers
After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers. Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers, supporting anything other than the most mainstream configuration seems wasteful.
> Given that Linux users probably represent the long tail of Dropbox customers ...
You also need to account for network effects. Every startup I have been at in the last decade went like this:
The engineers are using Linux, so for everyone to collaborate, a solution that works on Linux too is needed. That is a list of one - Dropbox, and they got their business accounts, and professional accounts.
Now Dropbox is dropped, or on the way out in all those places. Their lack of multi-account support (and I don't mean the nonsense they do pseudo merging accounts) also made it a huge pain anyway.
> After reaching a certain critical mass, maintaining additional features and functionality to reach potential customers is counterproductive. It directs resources away from the core product and customers.
This seems like an odd take in the comments section of an announcement of all new features that many people don't seem to care about. My ideal Dropbox would be able to sync with every filesystem under the sun since easy synchronization is their core product. Not integration with Slack or Trello or some weird workplace workflow.
In this case, I should have just as easily said “paying customers” because there were a decent amount of people already using Dropbox (and paying for it) that had other than ext4 filesystems. I know many people that got bitten by this also had encrypted home directories (Ubuntu ecryptfs), which was also not supported and fairly common.
I personally use Dropbox heavily because it is an easy way to sync shared folders between all of the people I work with (mix of Mac and Windows). However, it’s really difficult to also use it with the Linux servers I also need to sync data to/from. In the end, I created a developer account and use a script that is linked to that account to copy data to/from Dropbox on demand.
Would it be nice to have a supported solution for this? Yes
Do I expect a supported solution from Dropbox? No. There are too many variables and I don’t expect Dropbox to be able to handle everything. I’m just happy that they make a solution possible for me to manually use.
>- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
I contacted support a few weeks ago because I couldn't find the file(s) I was looking for. They keep changing the UI. They told me to use the search feature. That feature is lacking and it doesn't help that I don't know the filename since it was an uploaded photo from my phone. I left them feedback that the UX sucks and that they need to stop changing things for changing sake. Things are/have gotten worse regarding their UX. I think their devs are thinking and selling themselves on their ideas of what improvements are rather than current customers. If they want to try new things, leave the existing product alone and a launch an entirely new(er) product like DHH and basecamp do without disrupting their own existing paying customers![1]. Don't upset happy customers and give them a reason to re-evaluate your offering and other options.
> If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems
Seems like there's a really clear "SKU" that could be continued and refined, alongside this new initiative, to keep people like yourself happy, paying customers. Why would they be so shortsighted to think everyone would want this new thing?
why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space?
I don’t understand how anyone outside of photographers and people working with audio or video could need that kind of storage.
I have used Dropbox and Google Drive with around 1TB of Logic Pro X projects before, but that’s a ton of data to keep laying around (without using selective sync) and represents much more than the “active” projects I actually need to keep handy.
As a normal personal user, I’m probably closer to your estimates of 200-300GB of data and that’s mostly iPhone photos data. I currently stored my photos with Google but am planning to move my data over to iCloud since all my devices are Apple and performance seems better.
"If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, "
A thousand times, yes - are you listening Dropbox?
If you don't do this, you're going to get 'Zoomed' (i.e. basic company like Zoom comes along and eats your lunch for just doing the basic offer)
Same. It isnt as nice as Dropbox as there doesn't seem to be any linux support, so I use Grive running as a cron job.
It does run on ZFS though. I never realised Dropbox didn't. I guess that puts to rest that ocasssional nagging thought that maybe it would be worth the extra £8 or so to move to Dropbox.
Dropbox seems to have prioritized enterprise customers and de-prioritized consumers as customers. Most consumers would need a solid storage and sync solution, and nothing more. So you’re likely not the target customer any longer.
We ended up with two solutions: for family, we now upload photos to Smugmug with a password-protected gallery. The simplest plan is good enough for us and is ~50 per year.
For file sync, we switched to Resilio Sync. I had used Resilio Sync before for moving large files. It's not perfect, but gets the job done and is very fast. We use two encrypted-only peers: our NUC that acts as our home NAS, plus a Hetzner server with 200GB storage (for 15 Euro per month), which is easy to scale up if we need more storage. So, there are two always-available peers.
We back up everything with restic and Arq on macOS to the NAS and to Backblaze B2. But we were already doing that when we used Dropbox.
The new setup also simplifies things a bit: before we needed Dropbox + Boxcryptor to encrypt data on Dropbox, but now untrusted nodes just use Resilio's encrypted-only peer functionality.
I did briefly consider NextCloud, but support for end-to-end encryption does not seem to be mature yet.
I’d love to use Smugmug but their video support was pretty bad the last two times I tried using it. Google and Apple photos seem to be the only photo and video platforms that actually work.
The primary reasons:
- Constant nagging in the user interface to upgrade to Dropbox Pro or Dropbox Business. Don't want it, don't need it.
- Accumulation of a lot of UI clutter over the years. When you used to log in, you just your files. Now you get suggestions, unread comments, or whatever.
- Dropping support for file systems outside ext4. One of my machines uses Linux on ZFS, now I need to LD_PRELOAD shims to make Dropbox work. No, I am not switching back to ext4 for you, Dropbox.
- The camel that broke the straw's back: raising the prices from 10 to 12 Euro per month. It is not like we can't afford it. But storage and bandwidth gets cheaper, but Dropbox gets more expensive. We do not need the new features: why would I need 2TB if I am only using 200-300GB of space? And no, I don't want Smart Sync, which puts itself in ring-0 through a kernel module.
If Dropbox had just stuck to its nice, clean, and simple interface, focusing on syncing across machines with various OSes or file systems, we would still be happy, paying users. They wouldn't have to add anything (though the File Requests feature was nice). Just don't bother me with nonsense and let me do my work and share with family + friends.