Sometimes the honor system just doesn’t work.
Up until yesterday, Dropbox offered an unlimited $24-per-user-per-month plan for businesses called Dropbox Advanced. Dropbox Advanced came with an “as much as you need”storage cap intended to free business users from needing to worry about quotas.
Dropbox also says that this behavior had 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 decided to impose a 15 TB cap on organizations with three or fewer users. An additional 5 TB per user can be added on top of that, with a maximum cap of 1,000 TB per organization.
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 5 TB 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 1 TB 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 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.