The Great Dropbox Space Race

I don't really understand Dropbox's pricing strategy. Free is 2GB, which is no-where near enough. But if you want to pay for more, you have to go all the way to 100GB, which is way too much, for me at least. And the only in-between option is to engage in these kind of games or spamming your friends to try to make them sign up. I'm not going to do that.<p>Dropbox, if you would just offer $20/20GB and $50/50GB accounts I know at least 5 people who would upgrade immediately. I feel like people want to pay, but such a massive and unnecessary jump in capacity from the free to the lowest paid plan is a real problem. And yeah, I do feel a bit personally annoyed about this - I (somewhat reluctantly) pay for a 100GB account; I use perhaps 10% of it.<p>I really don't care about this viral marketing to school students. Dropbox, concentrate on your actual paying customers please.<p>EDIT: I checked and I use 7.0% of my 104.2GB paid account allowance.

Dropbox reminds me a lot of webmail before Gmail. There were lots of small increments in available space but it was always an issue for users. When Gmail launched wih the promise that users would never again have to manage remaining space they obliterated the competition.<p>Dropbox is training users to attach a high value to small amounts of space. When a competent competitor launches with an order of magnitude more space it will immediately seem like a much better deal because of Dropbox's years of conditioning their users to think the only value proposition is the physical space.

I see that the rewards for this program are for a limited time (extra 3GB for 2 years). Maybe they realized their free plan + referral space was too generous. I currently have 21.9GB for free on my Dropbox taking advantage of the 18GB of referrals you can get as well as the additional couple GB they give you if you use the "Camera Upload" feature.<p>If they gave all these students that 3GB permanently that might bring people up to some sweet spot where most of them wouldn't have a real need to pay for the service.

I'm really interested that MIT is now top of the board considering it's a relatively small university. It makes me wonder if this is going to become a situation like when Slashdot attempted to poll for best graduate cs department and it was botted to hell and back.

I don't really understand what's going on here. Could someone please explain this to me?

I love how number 1, 2, and 4 are Singaporean :D Nerd country!

If only I had a university email account. I would just launch an adwords campaign. :)

Dropbox are genius at marketing their product. Absolutely genius.

As of the time of this writing, there are 4 Portugese universities among the top 10. I would've expected tech-heavy universities to place among the top 10. Is this the case with these schools?<p>2 Universidade Técnica de Lisboa 3694 8298 points<p>6 Universidade de Aveiro 2244 4812 points<p>8 Universidade do Porto 2060 4538 points<p>9 Universidade Nova de Lisboa 1943 4079 points

Any word on if Dropbox will ever add the ability to sync arbitrary directories and not only the 'Dropbox' one? That's the reason I won't use their service. I want to see native support that doesn't require workarounds such as symlinks -- their competitors all offer this feature.

Great idea for a viral campaign

How will they reclaim the space in two years time for users who, for whatever reason, don't explicitly choose the files they want to keep?

What other promotions has Dropbox done in the past?

That's a great idea to get users!

It seems that we can't use this in China.

And... NUS wins!