this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits (arstechnica.com)
submitted 1 year ago by L4s to c/technology
149 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Too many users abused unlimited Dropbox plans, so they’re getting limits::Some people have taken "as much space as you need" too literally.

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

It was a business plan and they found hardly any of the plan subscribers were actually businesses

And why the fuck would that matter? If they can't handle some random's porn and piracy collection, how the fuck would they handle a legit business? lol

Reselling an account would hurt their bottom line, but still have no effect on providing the storage. Imposing a limit doesn't stop that though, other than perhaps by making the product worthless and therefore unworthy of reselling.

[–] baronvonj 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

why the fuck would that matter?

Because it "hurt their bottom line" in some measurable way. Yeah I'd be pissed if I were a subscriber of this plan. But either you accept the caveats of using someone else's infrastructure or you roll your own. ¯\(ツ)/¯

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If you offer me "unlimited Hotdogs" and proceed to be offended by me eating infinite Hotdogs, you did not offer "unlimited Hotdogs".

That's "false advertising" Baron von Jenius.

[–] baronvonj 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

That’s “false advertising” Baron von Jenius

🤣 Kudos for being the first to lobby that particular insult 🍻

They advertised a service, people used the service and it was as advertised, the service was deemed to be unprofitable due to usage, they announced the discontinuation of the service and no longer advertise it. ~~I don't see any mention of unlimited storage in any of their plans~~ Edit: they do say "as much space as needed - Customizable" for the Enterprise plan. So that's likely how they're distinguishing the "legitimate business" users, to still offer a plan for clients needing more storage and probably has tiered/progressive pricing where it gets cheaper per GB/TB the more you use, but lets DropBox feel like they've vetted these high use clients to avoid the use cases they mentioned.

https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison
https://www.dropbox.com/plans

As long as subscribers to the unlimited plan retain unlimited storage through the end of the term for which they had already paid, then DropBox is fulfilling the terms of the service they sold. And the last two paragraphs of the article seem to indicate that DropBox is indeed doing that

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 5TB 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 1TB 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 the 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.

So I don't think false advertising applies here.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Because some people where using it for crypto mining some coins that depend on storage space.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 year ago

This was dumb AF anyways. If you really have a problem with a few large accounts, you just make their access rates to their data atrocious. There's no way the plan guarantees an access speed.