Front-end web developer, entrepreneur, and teacher at @lighthouselabs. @emberjs guru

Jun 26, 2016

Why I‘m Leaving Dropbox After 2 Years of Pro Subscription

Today, I am cancelling my Dropbox Pro subscription. I have been a Pro subscriber for over 2 years now.

Back in the early 2010s, Dropbox was an obvious choice; services like Google Drive, Box, Copy, OneDrive, and Amazon Glacier didn’t exist. When you wanted to sync a file across the cloud, you really had one choice: Dropbox.

Now, all of this has changed. Dropbox is now one of the most expensive cloud storage providers, and only controls 27% of the market. It seems almost stupid to continue using Dropbox, with providers like Google Photos and iCloud offering unlimited photo cloud storage.

Dropbox costs more for me than my annual hosting fees, put together.

When I first started using Dropbox, it was great; I was awarded with a free month of paid services. I got way more than just the free month, too: I helped in pioneering the technology, and provided over 15 referrals to the service in its early days. I was even awarded a free year’s of Pro subscription + 1TB of storage for a year as a sufferer of the selective sync issue.

When I look back, Dropbox got me hooked like this. As I continued to use the service, the amount of files I had stored in the cloud increased and increased, until I had well over the standard 1TB.

And I couldn’t switch either. What people don’t tell you is how difficult it is to migrate your data to another service. With over 1TB of data, you’d think such a task would be easy by simply copying folder structures over. However, the task becomes much harder, as dropbox makes sure to not show you folder sizes, even in their own app. This meant that I had to check each file and folder individually before syncing to an alternative service.

Seem on purpose? Of course.

I am sick and tired of Dark UX patterns to keep users on Dropbox. Today, my monthly payment of 14CAD a month will end, and I will begin migrating all of my data to an alternative. 14CAD is just way too much, and I hope Dropbox can reduce this cost to something more reasonable like $5CAD/mo at the most.