Dropbox for Business

DropBox really shines when it comes to the capabilities of their client. I installed Box from few months ago at work, and used it to share a few screencasts that I was working on &gt; 200MBs per file about 10 files. I got home and fired up the home machine...For the next five minutes the internet connection was jammed. Turns out you cannot do a selective sync of only certain folders. This would be a very basic use case in my opinion but is not supported by Box.<p>So, for all those whinging about the price...it is not really that bad.

Unless they drop the price soon we&#x27;re going to move away from them. It sounds silly to argue over $15&#x2F;user&#x2F;month, but in comparison to Google Drive it&#x27;s just started feeling too expensive.<p>I really like the product, but I don&#x27;t know if any product in a commoditized space can sustain such a price premium.

Dropbox has a scaling problem.<p>Not from a technical point of view but from a usage point of view especially when we talk enterprise.<p>Dropbox is great for small teams or personal accounts. As long as there are very few owners of the files stored there.<p>The problems starts to arise when larger groups of people use it as a place to store files. At that point it basically looses it&#x27;s value namely because its no longer possible to find what you need simply by going to dropbox.<p>Instead what you now have to do is to find a given person working on a given project and then ask them where they put their files.<p>Dropbox will have to solve this problem either by adding some sort of history trail or by providing a better contextual search algorithm (files that James Jameson worked on in 2013 on project X)<p>From what I have seen in that area they are currently solving the wrong problems (again from a usage point of view)

We used dropbox at my prior company, we are now using box. Not sure if it&#x27;s just because I&#x27;m not used to box, or if I&#x27;m biased since I use dropbox for personal storage too, but I really wish we used dropbox instead of box. I find the UI + integration way better on dropbox.

I understand that nobody likes a race towards the bottom with regard to pricing, but IMO Dropbox is playing their pricing a little over confidently right now given what competitors are offering.<p>In both the comments on HN and the original thread pricing keeps coming up.<p>And the response is that this is a great product and pricing is acceptable.<p>I don&#x27;t think so.<p>Businesses switching costs are MUCH higher than consumer.<p>EG to switch a business service lots of co&#x27;s have to incorporate multiple stakeholders, decision makers, etc.<p>Which is why VC&#x27;s pour buckets of money into proven SAAS models around business services - because businesses stick almost no matter what!<p>So is DropBox&#x27;s pricing scheme out of line with their potential to grown more quickly?<p>In my experience from the consumer perspective I am actively seeking alternatives to DropBox due to their current pricing.<p>I was an average 100GB user very happy with the product for years.<p>Then I had kids.<p>And BOOM I have a million pictures, videos, etc that are PRICELESS to me.<p>And now I&#x27;m on a $600&#x2F;year plan for 500 GB &#x2F; mo.<p>And Google drive is now offering 2x as much storage as that for $10&#x2F;month.<p>So 20% of the cost for twice as much.<p>I gotta say it is very compelling and I can&#x27;t believe that the GOOG product a few iterations out isn&#x27;t a direct comparable.<p>Dropbox&#x27;s pricing is making this very loyal consumer unhappy, and seems like especially WRT to handling business users they should be aggressively pricing to own the market.

This is pretty interesting. I was just looking for executive summaries and I just found this Box[1] example which beings with a pretty hard hitting opener.<p><pre><code> &gt; Would you use your personal email account to message important customers? &gt; Would you make lengthy personal phone calls from your work phone? If not, then &gt; why would you use your personal Dropbox account to store critical business &gt; information? </code></pre> That being said, I&#x27;ve been using Dropbox since Drew dropped that hilariously amazing deadpan intro to the product and I been loving it every since. For a small team, I feel like the $795 price point might be a bit steep considering how many other alternatives offer you free collaborative space, but the integration of Dropbox is one of the best I&#x27;ve seen yet.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.rochester.edu/it/box/assets/pdf/migratedropbox" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.rochester.edu&#x2F;it&#x2F;box&#x2F;assets&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;migratedropbox</a>

The Box&#x2F;Dropbox comparisons here ignore the collaboration layer and its value. Dropbox is hands down the best when you want a folder that syncs; it just doesn&#x27;t save you much time in a business context when used that way. Cloud storage is just the first layer of value.<p>If you&#x27;re thinking in terms of cost per gigabyte, you&#x27;re missing the point for the audience this is aimed at. If you&#x27;re thinking &quot;how can this replace email threads&quot; and solve business issues (like employees getting fired and files not being migrated), that&#x27;s way better as a comparison.<p>Seems like that depth is 1-2 years out for Dropbox and ...well, not sure for Google Drive and their roadmap for business.

<i>give users one Dropbox for personal stuff and another for work stuff. Users can easily access both Dropboxes from any of their devices.</i><p>Sounds awesome!<p><i>Minimum 5 users</i><p>Well, phooey. This seems...arbitrary. Do they enforce this limit just to reduce support queries from low-profit customers?

The unlimited storage is a pretty smart play. It makes it much harder to compare this head-to-head with Google Drive.

Was anyone else hoping for reduced pricing? Neat features for businesses, but with recent price drops by Amazon and Google I was expecting Dropbox to follow.

I am a big fan of Dropbox. I have tried other cloud storage&#x2F;sync providers at various points of time and had a sour experience - Box: couldn&#x27;t figure out how to sync, SkyDrive&#x2F;OneDrive: refused to sync, Google Drive: was so slow that I tried to speed it up by copying over existing data from another machine and it created two copies of everything! In over 3 years I haven&#x27;t faced a single problem with Dropbox.<p>Selling to the enterprise is a very different thing though. Quality comes way down in their priority list. The bureaucratic strongholds in enterprises require compromised quality at every level in order to maintain their fiefdom. I know Dropbox needs to make more money, but maybe this is not the right direction in which to probe?

Does $180&#x2F;user&#x2F;year seem excessively high to anyone else?

Sync and share is commodity. The trick is to add value and create APIs that unlock the value of having all your data in the cloud. Right now, the whole space is just a big land grab with many entrants and many different strategies. My money is on Box. They have realized that the dollars are in enterprise and that enterprise customers have a few needs around security and control that frankly noone else can offer.

The chatting while editing feature is great. This is something that has been missing versus Google Drive. The added benefit of using existing apps is very nice since you can be working on files that Drive does not support. Will have to take a look at this. Price wise though, it is a little high.

Hmmm, I already had two dropboxes running on my computer (one personal and one business) using Dropbox Encore and I have my work Dropbox (much bigger than personal Dropbox) to sync to another folder on my regular hard drive -- personal syncs to my smaller SSD. Linking my accounts (which obviates the need for Dropbox Encore) seems to want to create a new Dropbox folder to download all my work things and not give me a choice of where to put it AND automatically change the name of my personal dropbox folder, which is a shame as I have some local scripts using that run it. Any chance of an &quot;advanced setup&quot; where we can pick which accounts sync where with no need to automatically rename folders that already exist on my hard drive?

Why use this when there are options like bitcasa - 1TB at $10&#x2F;month?<p>Another plus is they offer a real external drive that doesnt duplicate data.<p><a href="https://www.bitcasa.com/pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bitcasa.com&#x2F;pricing</a><p>Disclosure: I am a happy bitcasa customer.

One of the most important features to the company I work for is being able to share sub-folders within a shared folder. Without it, you have to completely give up hierarchical organization of your data.<p>This feature is still missing as far as I can tell.

Does dropbox allow others to upload to specific folders within your account? Can I create a folder for each client then send a link that will allow them to upload documents to their folder?

I lost trust in Dropbox when it comes to the quality of their client and I would therefore not use it for business purposes.<p>* I&#x27;ve had two instances of near data loss where I could only recover data from the local hidden cache folder that gets deleted after a week. It had to do with a user error with moving out files from the Dropbox directory when the client was off - previous versions in the webapp can easily become corrupted this way.<p>* the Mac client is a total CPU hog since Mountain Lion.

It&#x27;s all very nice, but there&#x27;s a very large elephant conspicuously absent from the room: encryption.<p>Not present in any of the 114 comments here so far, either.<p>Might be a problem.

Did anyone read the comments by the owner of DMS? It&#x27;s such a funny thing to see a legal&#x2F;offer exchange in comments. I&#x27;d love to know the background of that discussion.

&gt;$795 &#x2F; year for a 5-user team. Additional users are $125 &#x2F; user &#x2F; year.<p>I love dropbox for personal use. But hey! ever heard of Google Drive and know their pricing?

Finally they have a free trial available<p>Previously if you had to develop against Dropbox business features like SSO you had to shell out $$$

I wonder how the collaboration inside of applications works. Is there going to be a new API for integration?

Did I miss the cost and signup page?

Dropbox at work: The proxy server is refusing connections<p>They&#x27;re just blocking the whole domain.<p>(Edit for those of you who think I&#x27;m just trolling for effect. I work at a LARGE fortune 500 (think 250,000 people) and <a href="http://www.dropbox.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dropbox.com&#x2F;</a> is blocked at the proxy. If your company is going to offer business services, to, hum, businesses, one should insure that one should be accessible from businesses, no?)