Dropbox Ends Unlimited Cloud Storage Following Google Change
Dropbox Inc., a provider of online data storage, is ending its unlimited option, saying a small handful of customers were using massive amounts of resources that had the potential to degrade the cloud service for the rest of its clients.
The company's highest-tier “all the space you need” storage plan will be capped at about 5 terabytes per user for new customers, the company said in a blog post shared with Bloomberg to be released Thursday. That's enough space to save about 33 million documents, Dropbox said.
While the plan was designed for businesses, some clients were instead using it for cryptocurrency mining, pooling storage with strangers, or re-selling the cloud service, Dropbox said. These uses “frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers,” the company said.
With more than 18 million paying users, Dropbox is one of the best-known companies in the cloud storage industry and reported $2.5 billion in annual recurring revenue during its fiscal-second quarter earnings on Aug. 3. The company has worked to expand beyond storage with document management services and video-specific tools.
The change follows Alphabet Inc.'s Google removing “as much storage as you need” product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, according to copies of its website hosted on the Wayback Machine. Customers have posted on forums about being told they had exceeded storage limits and needed to pay for additional capacity. Some discussed moving to Dropbox after receiving such warnings.
A Google spokesperson said the company began rolling out “pooled storage” for customers last year, and those using over 80% of their
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