Dropbox Pro Increases Storage Capacity, Leaves Price Alone

By Kevin Parrish
published

What's great about Dropbox is that users can quickly share files with smartphones, tablets, notebooks and desktop PCs. Gone is the need to whip out a USB cable to pass a file from one device to another. Now we have a number of services that will gladly store our family photos and documents, including Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box and Dropbox.

Up until today, Dropbox provided Dropbox Pro users with 100 GB for $9.99 per month. That may sound like plenty of storage in theory, but it's really not when you're backing up loads of videos and/or images -- never mind a complete system backup. Perhaps this is why Dropbox -- and other storage services for that matter -- has decided to increase the storage capacity while leaving the price of the service unchanged, offering subscribers 1 TB of storage for $9.99 per month.

"We don't want you to worry about choosing the right plan or having enough space," the Dropbox blog said. "So today, we're simplifying Dropbox Pro to a single plan that stays at $9.99/month, but now comes with 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space."

The news shouldn't be surprising given that Google offers the same price tag for 1 TB of storage. Microsoft's OneDrive for Business charges $2.50 per user per month for 1 TB of space, whereas the consumer version charges $3.99 per month for 200 GB. Those with an Office 365 subscription also receive 1 TB per person up to 5 TB per household. What Microsoft doesn't provide consumers is a $9.99 subscription plan for 1 TB, but that will likely change.

In addition to the new subscription plan, Dropbox Pro now features new sharing controls. These include passwords for shared links, expirations for shared links, and view-only permissions for shared folders. The company has also introduced Remote Wipe, a feature that will let you remove Dropbox files on a device that is lost or stolen.

Dropbox offers three plans: Basic, Pro and Business. The Basic plan starts customers off with 2 GB, and it's up to their referred friends to jack up the storage capacity by signing up. Dropbox for Business has all the features of the Pro service, plus a few extra features for $15 per user per month.

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Kevin Parrish
13 Comments Comment from the forums
  • DelightfulDucklings
    Good to see them being competitive. My problem with Dropbox is that I always get terrible upload speeds to it so I barely use it aside from stuff I really need to backup
    Reply
  • crumpet
    Good to see them being competitive. My problem with Dropbox is that I always get terrible upload speeds to it so I barely use it aside from stuff I really need to backup

    Agreed, on an average connection it can take hours for a few videos.
    Still great service and perfect for anything pictures and below
    Reply
  • icemunk
    $10 a month is too pricey. Dropbox should offer something like $1 or $2 a month for 100 or 200GB.
    Reply
  • teddy1234
    cloud storage is and will be useless until american broadband stops selling 1998 speeds... My timewarner cable still only offers a max of 1 meg uploads, which means uploads of videos/picture backups can take hours/days.

    As for mobile use, the limited data plans just about every carrier sells now a days leaves what you put in the cloud there as downloading something like a video would put you over your data limit in no time.....
    Reply
  • ET3D
    "What Microsoft doesn't provide consumers is a $9.99 subscription plan for 1 TB, but that will likely change."

    Why would Microsoft provide a $9.99 1TB subscription plan when it offers for that price Office for up to 5 users plus 1TB each? Plus it offers Office + 1TB for one user for $6.99.
    Reply
  • icemunk
    cloud storage is and will be useless until american broadband stops selling 1998 speeds... My timewarner cable still only offers a max of 1 meg uploads, which means uploads of videos/picture backups can take hours/days.

    As for mobile use, the limited data plans just about every carrier sells now a days leaves what you put in the cloud there as downloading something like a video would put you over your data limit in no time.....

    Yeah, mobile data is a racket and carriers charge far too much for it.The real use I find for my dropbox is the simple ability to take pictures on my smartphone, and have them auto-upload to my dropbox. The 10GB I have for free at the moment is plenty fine for that. If they offered a dirt cheap plan for $1 or $2 a month for 200 gigabytes or something, I may consider it, but at the moment I see no use for huge amounts of cloud storage.
    Reply
  • rohitbaran
    Dropbox is much behind in terms of free space compared to copy. I switched to copy a while back and have 55 GB free space.
    Reply
  • fmaxwell
    One terabyte is far too small to do a system backup for my primary workstation (even if the speed magically became fast enough, say gigabit per second or higher) and far bigger than I need to share files, photos, music, documents, etc. between systems and devices. I'm just not seeing the appeal.

    Reply
  • christinebcw
    They need to pave Rural America with greater broadband speeds. Or ANY broadband speeds, first.
    Reply
  • fmaxwell
    14077420 said:
    They need to pave Rural America with greater broadband speeds. Or ANY broadband speeds, first.
    Similar to the the Rural Electrification Act of 1935, which provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve rural areas of the United States? But that was in the days before the Tea Party and the Ayn Rand libertarians who fight any government effort to improve the lives of U.S. citizens. Were there be a Rural Broadband Act of 2014, many on the right would fight it tooth and nail, claiming that the Founding Fathers never intended for the federal government to be involved in broadband initiatives and that if we just got rid of all government regulation of cable and telephone companies, the free market would magically fix everything.
    Reply