Using what you’re offered is considered abuse now? Huh…
Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.
Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.
Oh no, a small number of my users are actually using my service the way I advertised it. Better change it
Unlimited* plans are always sold on the idea that a sizeable part of the user base aren’t going to use an actual unlimited amount of the resource.
Unless there is a contract regarding a fee over a period of time, there isn’t that much that users can do to compel a service to offer a service they no longer want to offer.
Absolutely! But I don’t think that’s the point of contention here. The problem is the “abuse” rhetoric, since it’s not just incorrect but disingenuous to basically claim that the users did anything wrong here. They’re imposing limits because they miscalculated how many heavy users they could handle.
Again, that’s a completely reasonable move, but framing it as anything but a miscalculation on their part is just a dick move.
“Unlimited” is always a marketing gimmick, and they’ll always contact you like “hey I noticed you’re actually trying to use the thing you paid for you need to stop or we’ll terminate you”. Along the same lines: “Lifetime license” means 5 years, and “All-You-Can-Eat Pancakes means Four Pancakes.”
I like what is it, backblaze where it’s unlimited as long as the drive is connected to your computer
Weird way to justify their price increase. Offering unlimited storage to business users, and finding out businesses are finding ways to leverage that for profit… shouldn’t have been labeled as abuse… Rising to market incentives might be a better approach.
Some of these “businesses” are in fact chia farming and whatnot, though. I know the marketing language is always what gets people ruffled up in datahoarder, but this isn’t exactly something I would consider as a legitimate business use and a single plot uses 100GB of space which can’t even begin to be deduplicated. If your entire business resolves around making money as a result of storing unreasonably large amounts of data then the cloud ain’t it and realistic data costs need to be factored into your data models. I’m actually a bit surprised that Dropbox responded so quickly to the influx of gdrive abusers.
For the average user, it would be substantially more cost effective and sustainable for you to invest in hard drives rather than paying Dropbox $100/mo to rent storage. Cloud providers will decide at any time to change the term of your agreement. The hard drive is yours until it dies.
SELFHOST! No matter how good the deal is, no matter how free or expensive it is, you can not trust a cloud service to last as long as you need it.
Too many people used the unlimited space that was offered. That is not abusing.
“unlimited storage” was definitely a thing back in the day when the average high end user had a couple of TBs of data, but anyone using that now is just stupid. Full on stupid.
Average high end users can and do have hundreds of TBs now. Companies are entering into the PB ranges. I feel no sympathy for a company who is just now figuring this out. Yes it’d be nice to have unlimited storage as a user, but as a company there is no sense to the cost anymore, and they should have done this 8 years ago
This is probably a result of that dumb crypto currency that uses proof of storage and people were just using Dropbox for it
But I wonder: doesn’t it need to be accessible to be read locally? If I mine like 1 petabytes of stuff, then I can upload somewhere else and forget about it?
Otherwise they could mine on a disk, then wipe, start again.
IMHO they found a scapegoat, everyone (me included) loves to blame crypto bros for anything bad, but I don’t see how here can happen
This is the best summary I could come up with:
This was intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.
Dropbox says that these users were using “thousands of times more storage than [their] genuine business customers.”
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 145 words. Saved 59%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I have one of the mod-tier consumer versions and I would happily pay for an extra TB…they simply don’t offer it at any price. I would love to per TB filter down to their family/plus/std plans.
