Dropbox is eliminating its unlimited option because some customers were coin mining, pooling data for personal use, and reselling storage. The highest-tier “all the space you need” storage package will be capped.
Dropbox claims users who buy a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licences would get 15TB of team-shared storage, enough to store 100 million documents, 4 million images, or 7,500 hours of HD video. Every active licence gets 5TB of storage.
In a blog post, the company said a growing number of customers were buying Advanced subscriptions for crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use, or even reselling storage. After other services made similar policy adjustments, we’ve witnessed a surge in this behaviour in recent months. clients like this often use thousands of times more storage than our commercial clients, which risks making our service unreliable for everyone.”
Bloomberg reported that Google deleted the “as much storage as you need” slogan from its highest-tier Workspace plan in May.
Over 99% of Advanced customers using less than 35TB of storage per licence will be notified and able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using at the time they’re notified, plus a 5TB pooled storage credit, for five years at no additional charge.
Less than 1% of customers using 35TB or more of storage per licence will be notified and given a 5TB pooled storage credit for one year (up to 1,000TB total) at no additional cost to their existing plan.
Customers who require more capacity can buy 1TB storage add-ons for $10/month if purchased monthly or $8/month if purchased annually on September 18 and November 1.
Dropbox will gradually migrate existing users to the new policy on November 1. The company said it will notify clients 30 days before their relocation date.
