Maybe. I think the people who are most benefiting from Dropbox (creatives, etc) are heavily impacted by COVID recession.
There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.
The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an individual.
They constantly upsell, even after you bought the product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension.
Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1 generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70% premium over competitive offers.
They also lost my trust when they sold our small team on a particular plan and then pulled all the valuable features out of that plan and raised prices 50% (or 100% if we wanted most of the features back). The messaging around that was also just cold marketing BS talking about how great these changes were. It all happened within first year of our subscription.
Luckily OneDrive was finally getting stable so we migrated over and I haven't touched dropbox since.
It quickly became clear they were focusing on enterprise customers and the SMB pricing we had undermined that effort.
> and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.
I think this is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this article.
I very recently signed up for Apple One, for Music/TV/iCloud (family photos in particular)/all the rest and the fact that I now use iCloud sync instead of Dropbox bothers me nil. Prime also comes with Photos, unlimited photo backup. Used to use that just fine. Google Photos is like $1/mo.
Honestly, if Disney bundled a cloud storage service into Disney+ I'd probably give it a shot. File syncing is a commoditized feature these days for the average Joe.
If you just want something to share files with your wife, I created an open source project that does exactly that: https://github.com/chrishulbert/flare/
Of course it's not as easy to set up as Dropbox, I originally had grand dreams of somehow turning this into a startup back when there were a lot of people upset that Dropbox was using an invasive kernel driver (IIRC), but I never found the time.
> and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.
Yeah, this. I've found myself drifting over to OneDrive for personal use; it's pretty good at least on macOS, and Dropbox is just one-more-thing running all of the time.
But also, almost every time I log into their service I get popups bugging me to upgrade, it happened just now. I pay ~ $100/yr at the moment and I guess I've been too lazy to eliminate that expense by moving everything to one provider. Today might be the day to change that.
There is no business case for running Dropbox in a large enterprise (I tried... our creatives cried about it), and it's an increasingly difficult case to make for a home user, as all of the alternatives are pretty good.
The other thing is that Dropbox is an easy app to fall out of love with as an individual.
They constantly upsell, even after you bought the product. I was paying >$100 year for Dropbox for years and they pushed Dropbox Teams at me relentlessly for most if it. Problem: I don't have a team! They also didn't pool storage (I think they do now), so sharing stuff with my wife like video would consume 2x the storage, unless I paid 5x for the business product. Google Drive or Office 365 are a way better value in any dimension.
Basically they have a solid core product, but instead of doing something productive with it, the surrounded it with layers of bullshit. While meandering around, they eliminated the portion of the product focused on the #1 generator of storage needs (ie. photo/video), segmented basic features like PDF search, etc. All at a 20-70% premium over competitive offers.
Good riddance.