Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken “as much space as you need” too literally.

  • Prethoryn Overmind
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Am I the only fucking rational person here that doesn’t give a shit? Things change either pay for the new storage limits or don’t. Can we move on now? Can we talk about something that isn’t about a big business making a big business move that you disagree with because you hate said big business and only want to use Linux? We get it. Windows bad.

    Let’s move the hell on then.

    EDIT: Lemmy users really do need to find something else to do with their fucking lives besides complain about subscriptions.

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆
    link
    fedilink
    English
    140
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    How the fuck do you abuse unlimited access? This is just a company blaming an idea that was always going to be unsustainable on their customers and not their own damn lack of forethought.

    • Baron Von J
      link
      fedilink
      English
      192 years ago

      It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses, and I’m guessing reselling your unlimited data was against the ToS.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 🏆
        link
        fedilink
        English
        33
        edit-2
        2 years ago

        It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses

        And why the fuck would that matter? If they can’t handle some random’s porn and piracy collection, how the fuck would they handle a legit business? lol

        Reselling an account would hurt their bottom line, but still have no effect on providing the storage. Imposing a limit doesn’t stop that though, other than perhaps by making the product worthless and therefore unworthy of reselling.

        • @s_s@lemmy.one
          link
          fedilink
          English
          02 years ago

          This was dumb AF anyways. If you really have a problem with a few large accounts, you just make their access rates to their data atrocious. There’s no way the plan guarantees an access speed.

        • Baron Von J
          link
          fedilink
          English
          82 years ago

          why the fuck would that matter?

          Because it “hurt their bottom line” in some measurable way. Yeah I’d be pissed if I were a subscriber of this plan. But either you accept the caveats of using someone else’s infrastructure or you roll your own. ¯\(ツ)

          • Janet
            link
            fedilink
            English
            102 years ago

            If you offer me “unlimited Hotdogs” and proceed to be offended by me eating infinite Hotdogs, you did not offer “unlimited Hotdogs”.

            That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius.

            • Baron Von J
              link
              fedilink
              English
              3
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius

              🤣 Kudos for being the first to lobby that particular insult 🍻

              They advertised a service, people used the service and it was as advertised, the service was deemed to be unprofitable due to usage, they announced the discontinuation of the service and no longer advertise it. I don’t see any mention of unlimited storage in any of their plans Edit: they do say “as much space as needed - Customizable” for the Enterprise plan. So that’s likely how they’re distinguishing the “legitimate business” users, to still offer a plan for clients needing more storage and probably has tiered/progressive pricing where it gets cheaper per GB/TB the more you use, but lets DropBox feel like they’ve vetted these high use clients to avoid the use cases they mentioned.

              https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
              https://www.dropbox.com/plans

              As long as subscribers to the unlimited plan retain unlimited storage through the end of the term for which they had already paid, then DropBox is fulfilling the terms of the service they sold. And the last two paragraphs of the article seem to indicate that DropBox is indeed doing that

              To help legitimate business users transition, Dropbox says that “customers using less than 35TB of storage per license” can keep however much they’re using plus an additional 5TB for five years “at no additional charge.” Organizations using more than 35TB will get the same deal for one year, but they’ll need to deal with Dropbox directly to work out pricing. As a baseline, adding 1TB of storage without adding additional users will cost either $10 a month or $96 a year.

              New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you’ll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans. Existing users will be “gradually migrated” to the new plans starting on November 1, and they’ll be notified at least 30 days before the migration happens.

              So I don’t think false advertising applies here.

    • @Blackmist@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      42 years ago

      They didn’t mean unlimited use. They meant “sign up, forget about it and pay us forever”.

    • @kronicd@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      22 years ago

      Honestly they’re giving existing users at least a year with their current storage capacity and plan.

      Google gave like 60 days. Dropbox are handling this much better.

      • @randomname01@feddit.nl
        link
        fedilink
        English
        22 years ago

        Uhu, exactly. I get that it’s frustrating, but the simple fact of the matter is that offering unlimited storage capacity (or unlimited anything for that matter) will inevitably attract people who will abuse it. Their new plans are functionally unlimited for most people, while also curbing that abuse.

        That’s not to praise Dropbox too much (they shouldn’t have offered unlimited in the first place, but it’s an easy way to draw people in), but I still can’t fault them too much for how they handled this.

  • AutoTL;DRB
    link
    fedilink
    English
    82 years ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.

    The company said in a blog post yesterday that it was retiring its unlimited storage policy specifically because people were buying Dropbox Advanced accounts “for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage.”

    Dropbox also says that this behavior has been getting worse recently because other services have also been placing caps on their storage plans—at some point within the last year, Google also removed similar “as much as you need” language from its Google Workspace plans.

    Rather than attempting to police behavior or play whack-a-mole with the people abusing the service, Dropbox has imposed a 15TB cap on organizations with three or fewer users.

    An additional 5TB per user can be added on top of that, with a maximum cap of 1,000TB per organization.

    New customers will be affected by this policy change immediately, as you’ll see if you check the current pricing for Dropbox Advanced plans.


    The original article contains 354 words, the summary contains 173 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • @echo64@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    652 years ago

    everything here is wrong, and blaming the users is wrong. Please try to read past the PR speak. and shame on ars for not doing that.

    the unlimited plan is going away to force companies that were using it, to switch to their new unlimited plan which is now called Enterprise and will generate a lot more money for them. The plan still exists, they’ve changed the requirements so you can only get it if you spend a lot of money.

  • El Barto
    link
    fedilink
    English
    13
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I always hated the term unlimited when it’s not really unlimited. Is it really abuse if you’re using it as intended?

    Edit: I eat my words. People are assholes. I thought this was referring to providers of unlimited storage or bandwidth, only to say “oh, you’ve using it too much, so we’re going to throttle you.”

    • @doublejay1999@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      272 years ago

      I think you are right the first time.

      “Unlimited “ only ever an advertising term, to garner attention. No one ever intends to deliver on it .

      • @Infinitus@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        22 years ago

        I just want to add a surprising fact. My mobile carrier does actually deliver on the promise of unlimited data, and an ISP is the last company that I would trust.

          • @Infinitus@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            52 years ago

            I can try it, but my current record s 50 GB in a singled day. The only thing that it wants is a conformation via SMS for every 18 or so GB, but that is only if you use that much in a single day.

      • @johnthedoe@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        82 years ago

        I remember when google photos offered unlimited when it first came out. Called that off pretty damn quick

  • Flying Squid
    link
    fedilink
    English
    112 years ago

    My only concern about throttling it as 5TB for small organizations is that I could see that being a problem for freelance video editors. 8K video can take up a lot of space.

    • @kill_dash_nine@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      172 years ago

      At some point though I feel like if someone would be using Dropbox for 8k videos, they should be wondering if they are using the right solution for their needs. I would say absolutely not.

      • Flying Squid
        link
        fedilink
        English
        182 years ago

        Temporary storage of, say, a documentary with hundreds of hours of video so it can be transferred from the cameras to the editor who is working remotely seems like exactly the sort of thing Dropbox is for.

        • @kill_dash_nine@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          72 years ago

          Maybe I’m applying too much of my own personal use case for how I use tools like Dropbox then. I’m using it for documents I actually want synchronized between devices, with a cloud backup and history. I suppose if you’re looking at it for a cloud storage solution, ignoring the desktop sync aspect then I can see where that makes more sense.

          I just have a hard time wrapping my head around using cloud storage for such large files being an optimal solution but then again if storage cost is the biggest objection, unlimited storage sounds like it’s removing said objection and you don’t have much choice if you’re working as a remote team so great point, I hadn’t thought about it like that.

          • @T156@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            12 years ago

            It could also be good for a sharing solution, since putting it on dropbox, and sharing the link would be fairly simple compared to having to deal with the complications of sending larger videos in other ways.

        • @4am@lemm.ee
          link
          fedilink
          English
          52 years ago

          If you have hundreds of hours of 8k footage, no one is going to edit it off of Dropbox.

          If you have the storage capacity to hold all that footage elsewhere, you also have the capability to enable uploading directly to that storage.

          No one is using public cloud storage for these kinds of use cases, unless they’re extremely foolish.

          That being said, offering “unlimited” and then reneging on it is also, IMHO, foolish.

  • @alienanimals@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    1072 years ago

    Corporate bootlickers: OMG they’re actually using our unlimited service as if they were unlimited. THIS IS ABUSE!1!

  • @jwagner7813@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    312 years ago

    What they meant to say was “We didn’t have the foresight to monetize these heavy users, so we will be doing that now. But first we’ll create the problem…”

  • Illecors
    link
    fedilink
    English
    193
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I just don’t get it. If it’s unlimited - in what universe is using it beyond 15TB considered abuse?

    I get the reseller part, I get the stupid chia mining part. But if they can say that was the problem - then get rid of those users, as clearly you have already identified them. Don’t shift the blame away from your dumbass marketing team onto your users and play an innocent company.

    I can’t believe how much support dropbox is getting. People seem to accept, without questioning, every bollocks pr statement these days.

    • @foggy@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      552 years ago

      I worked for a company that was offering unlimited storage to its too tier customers.

      I brought it up in a meeting when we first started talking about it.

      “Okay but you don’t mean unlimited. That’s bad PR waiting to happen.”

        • @foggy@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          412 years ago

          Roughly

          “what do you mean?”

          “You cannot offer something that doesn’t exist. If Amazon decided to become a client, we’d be in a world of hurt.”

          “It’s fine none of our clients use more than a few hundred gigs”

          This was in 2018. They still offer unlimited storage. So I guess, what do I know?

            • @foggy@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              82 years ago

              A little over $150/mo

              Their service isn’t storage, has nothing to do with it. But at a certain level of storage, it’s… A steal.

          • @spiderman@ani.social
            link
            fedilink
            English
            22 years ago

            what would they do if some user just decides to use more than their “limit”? like hundreds of TB?

            • @T156@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              9
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              Boot them, most likely. Or eat the cost, and look to shutter the free space/apply limits ASAP.

              Not unlike Amazon Cloud, Google Drive, and Dropbox here. There was someone on the datahoarders Reddit who famously shoved a Petabyte of Data into their Cloud Drive offering, and likely contributed to it being shut down as a result.

          • Illecors
            link
            fedilink
            English
            42 years ago

            May I ask what the company is? You don’t have to disclose it publicly if you don’t want, I have matrix setup on my profile here.

    • @T156@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      18
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      Especially since 15TB isn’t all that big. It’s not tiny, but it’s also not out of the reach of a reasonably high end computer, or for a video editor who might need a lot of space for raws/recordings.

      It’s not like they’re looking at users eating up Petabytes of data, or something silly, where some restriction might be understandable.

      • @teruma@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        112 years ago

        Wait, the cap is 15TB? I run a small image processing business and I’m right about there with my businesses data, currently.

        …guess its time to NAS, but I’d really rather pay someone else than assume the hassle

        • @Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          32 years ago

          A NAS really isn’t that much of a hassle once you get it up and running. I’ve got a Synology DS918+ and love it. Although I’m sure you’d want something bigger (and newer) for supporting a small business.

          • @teruma@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            22 years ago

            That would be fine from a storage standpoint, except that the up front investment is significant compared to what I’ve paid Dropbox so far. I have to be my own resilience, redundancy, security, and and integration specialist. Can you even connect to a NAS on Android? I’d have to set up tasker or something for auto photo upload. Our power is not reliable and goes out frequently. I would have to learn how to expose it to the world outside my network. I’d have to monitor and replace dead drives. And that’s just me, while the other people on my account also need space and access, where they either have to set up their own NAS or use mine, so I’d have to look into file sequestration. I’ll have to re-automate everything to not use Dropbox APIs. There’s a much bigger mental load hidden behind “getting it up and running” that made paying someone else attractive. I’d’ve paid up to triple for continued unlimited storage, but now that there’s no option entirely and the highest limit is stupidly low, I have to rethink my entire workflow.

            • @Confused_Emus@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              22 years ago

              You make excellent points. I think the key difference for me when I got the NAS was that I wasn’t replacing an existing system. That and I actually enjoy playing with storage and networking, so I’m able to cover most of those bases you mentioned myself.

              For the power issues, you may want to look into getting a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for anything you want to stay powered. Larger ones can get pretty expensive, but you can usually find some smaller ones for a decent price that I think would be fine for small business use. I’ve used and had good experience with UPSs made by APC.

              • @teruma@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                22 years ago

                I do have a UPS for some of my stuff. I was planning on getting another small one for some networking stuff, but no reason I couldn’t get a bigger one to cover another device.

            • @GroggyGuava@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              English
              22 years ago

              I’m on my 15 so I don’t have time to list everything but a lot of your assumptions are wrong about what you’d have to learn/ need to set up on your own. Synology has a suite of apps for all your use cases that makes it quite easy to set up. And there’s apps for your phone (yes android) to connect to it from outside of your network.

              A good weekend of shmedium effort and you can have it all set up and running no problem.

              If your powers unreliable btw you should invest in a battery backup UPS to protect sensitive products.

              • @teruma@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                English
                22 years ago

                Ah, I do have a UPS for sensitive electronics, though I need another one for some other networking equipment anyway. That does make it feel more approachable. Maybe when my life stops taking a big steamy dump I’ll look into this with more earnest. Thanks for the overview!