Sounds like Dropbox has made the transition just fine. If you’re gonna ask me to pay a tenner a month you better give me what I think is the dollars worth of value. Dropbox did. Evernote did not. At least not for the vast majority of people who barely take some notes on some rare days.
Dropbox never took away anything they gave for free though. In the beginning they handed out extra space like candies, and the accounts that got it at the time still have it.
I dropped Dropbox with extreme prejudice (was a paying customer) when they decided to dictate which Linux filesystems I may use. Will never use them ever again. Randomly demanding I drop everything and re-engineer my stack is an invitation for me to re-engineer them out of my life.
Like everyone else, they have to decide what they support – their core product pretty heavily depends on known file system semantics – and they gave advanced notice specifically so you didn’t have to “drop everything” if you for some reason cannot have a partition using a supported file system.
Put another way, do you think the combined users of file systems which aren’t supported ext4, xfs, btrfs, or zfs are willing to pay more or would quietly accept the possibility of data loss? I doubt the former is true and have absolute certainty that if there was a bug using an unsupported file system that would result in angry, hyperbolic blog posts saying Dropbox is unsafe and will lose your data.
Oh are those all supported now? They've clearly backtracked massively. When I bounced they were insisting on ext4 only. Glad I didn't bother rebuild all my machines to ext4 only for them to change their damn minds. They gave us less than three months notice. I'm not playing chicken for three months paying their professional tier in the hopes they change their mind. Freaking circus.
The framing is not odd at all. Your framing makes it sound as if this was some requirement that had been known since the beginning rather than the typical "Good news! For our own corporate reasons we have decided to make your life better by jumping to the top of your todo list and breaking your things!" Thanks, I hate it.
To be clear it is trivial to thwart the check, but shared library shims can't fix the real problem which is pointless corporate contempt. Particularly if I'm paying for it.
They took away my "free" <huge amount of space for 2011> many years back. I mainly got the space hosting events at my university and other free work I performed for the company around that time as well as many, many referrals.
I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying.
Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it.
Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.
> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use.
Maybe not completely free, but iCloud desktop sync is pretty much a native MacOS clone of Dropbox. Especially for its core feature of cross-device syncing. Perhaps less so for sharing, although MacOS has been slowly adding those features to the point where I no longer get much value out of dropbox at all.
Still paying though, mostly out of laziness to migrate (which is literally as simple as dragging the files into a folder on my desktop, honestly I’m not sure why I haven’t done this yet)
Google drive and Dropbox don’t really have the same functionality. Google really wants you to use a web browser; in my experience the filesystem integration has always been flaky. Whereas Dropbox directories that appear in the local filesystem are really solid.
On the Mac OS that functionality has always been flakey, through several rewrites, not just bug fixes. About half the time it’s not syncing (often due to crashing, but sometimes just mysteriously) on my completely vanilla macos laptop. Dropbox “just works”.
Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.
However, Dropbox have some underrated yet very powerful features like Apps and automations. I buy books from plethora of places, and new versions of the products I have are uploaded automatically. I just receive a notification. Same for some fonts and design assets I have. SendOwl leverages this capability for anyone, easily.
Auto organization, a clunky but reliable native Linux application, LANSync, etc. are all good things to have, and they have solved the syncing problem.
Also, Google Drive is a ticking time bomb, because if you accidentally put a file Google doesn't like, you have the risk to lose all your Google access at the middle of the night.
- Dropbox: $119.88 per year for 2TB, plus $39.99 per year for one year version history.
- Google Drive: ~$11.3 per year for 2TB, ~$57 per year for 5TB.
