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Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

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Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#51

Post by petercooper »

Kequc wrote: post #22

In general; a $2 cup of coffee in north america costs 2€ in Europe. A $300 Wii U in north america costs 300€ in Europe. The only time currency conversion matters is because you are converting between two currencies, when buying a product from another country. GOG.com sells all their games in north american prices because it only has offices in north america. You are buying a product from north america when you buy fr…

It's the lag on charging tax for imported digital goods.

We do in the UK, if you're a VAT-registered business.

For example, let's say my business pays $100/month for Web hosting in the US (or even the £40/month I pay to Adobe for Creative Cloud). I then have to "reverse charge" $20 of VAT to my accounts but then also claim back $20 of VAT from the tax authorities.. so it's a net zero result, but we still "paid" it.

I don't believe this applies to regular citizens though, but I could be wrong.. if it does, I know no-one who does it.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#52

Post by lucaspiller »

chton wrote: post #40
brk wrote: post #31

Even for cloud-based services like dropbox, the cost of doing business in all countries is not the same. There are different laws/regulations to deal with, costs for having foreign-language support people, costs for internationalizing parts of the UI/etc. Personally, I think it's kind of odd to expect that something will cost the exact same amount anywhere in the world. It might be that the added cost for dropbox to…

The problem isn't just paying more. I'm aware of how tax-heavy europe is, and how much harder it is to support the wide variety of languages and laws. In most cases, I would be fine paying a bit more for a service. The problem is the way the mark-up happens. They're not calculating the difference and marking that up, they're literally just equating US dollars with euros. $99 and €99 might sound similar, but the diffe…

Netflix and Spotify are the same. Spotify is £9.99 here in the UK, €9.99 in most of Western Europe and $9.99 in the US. Admittedly they have to deal with record labels so it's a bit different, but it's not really an excuse.

Strangely Dropbox here is showing the price as $9.99.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#53

Post by aianus »

jvandenbroeck wrote: post #6

Yeah I hate it when I have to pay more for a service as a European. It might seem silly but that's the reason I cancelled my Spotify account, I didn't want to pay a 'European' premium. I hate it when they check from which country your creditcard number is - Netflix is nice that they allow you to register in a different country with a VPN & don't check the credit card country.

You can register in your home country for Netflix and the available shows will still be determined by your VPN's IP.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#54

Post by vacri »

jvandenbroeck wrote: post #6

Yeah I hate it when I have to pay more for a service as a European. It might seem silly but that's the reason I cancelled my Spotify account, I didn't want to pay a 'European' premium. I hate it when they check from which country your creditcard number is - Netflix is nice that they allow you to register in a different country with a VPN & don't check the credit card country.

Don't move to Australia then. Software prices are routinely jacked up for us. At least with conversion to the euro, there's a large amount of laziness in it. With Australian software, we're often paying 50% more to double the price. At one stage it was cheaper to buy Photoshop by flying across the Pacific ocean, buying a copy in the US, and flying back to Australia.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#55

Post by claudius »

masklinn wrote: post #41
Swizec wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, kind of, but not really. The problem right now is that €1 is worth $1.3. In Europe VAT is included and is about 20% in most countries (it does vary), in US it's not. So, a service that costs €1 in Europe, gets the provider €0.8, or $1.05. Import tax is generally the same as VAT as far as I know. Sales tax in the US is usually around 7% -> to a consumer, a $1 service costs $1.07. This means that if you import a $…

> Import tax is generally the same as VAT as far as I know. There's no import tax on software, on services, on cell phones or on laptops. I could find no such thing on TARIC anyway. It does list consoles with 0% import tax.

There are no customs, but you still have to pay import tax of the same amount as VAT would have been if you had bought the item locally as a consumer, at least that was the case last time I bought something in the US.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#56

Post by vetinari »

adwf wrote: post #32
Drakim wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a possibility, but it has to be weighed against the ill-will you generate among the customers who realize that they are given/have been paying a higher price. This article is a perfect example. It certainly doesn't boost my opinion of dropbox.

Very true. In this case I imagine it's just a VAT issue, it's usually included in the price by default in the EU. But whenever someone points out weird pricing and gets excited about a "great deal!", I usually have to check and think - is it really weird? Or is this entirely what is meant to happen?

It is not a VAT issue. Not only is VAT about the half of the price difference, but in addition, not everyone has to pay VAT. If you are private end-user, sure, you have to. But if you are a company, even if a small one (like startup, for example), you are surely registered VAT payer and you can get it back. But the price doesn't say whether it includes VAT or not. If you are purchasing outside of EEA, it usually does not.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#57

Post by 6cxs2hd6 »

wastedhours wrote: post #4
martinald wrote: post #2

Can you see a reference to them charging VAT? If not, that's pretty ludicrous.

My first thought was this as well - we tend to list prices inc VAT in Europe, but it's almost always without in the States, no?

> tend to list prices inc VAT in Europe

I was under the impression it's a legal requirement to show the inc VAT price. (And, show it as the most-prominent price -- no trickery like showing exc VAT bold, and inc VAT in fine print.)

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#58

Post by vetinari »

dspillett wrote: post #34
alandarev wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No its not. One does not include VAT, other does. In Dropbox example both include VAT. You can see this tendency clearly in digital games. When I worked with games pricing for MacOS, I asked why such a huge difference? Boss replied: "It is the easiest to force Europeans into premium costs". There is even a chrome extension which shows how much a game costs in different countries on Steam website: Buy Sid Meier's Civi…

For services like Spotify you do have to account for different delivery costs they may have in Europe. Bandwidth is more expensive over here (partly because it just is, and partly because in many places we are not as well served so it is a more contended resource) which they will have to factor in. There may be differing costs for payment processing too, and if they have any sort of tech support and documentation the…

Bandwidth is cheaper in Europe. See the Cloudflare article recently.

Also, regarding i18n for Europe: most of the time, it is localized only for FIGS (France, Italy, Germany, Spain). Other 20 or so (for EU, not Europe) countries get shown a finger. So why should they pay for that?

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#59

Post by rootinier »

dreen wrote: post #38

If you are in Europe I recommend hubiC instead of Dropbox. They are much cheaper and have servers in Europe (France - they are child company of OVH). Dropbox only has servers in America [1], so its slower. - 25GB free - 100GB 1€/m - 10TB 10€/m Yes you read that right, its TEN TIMES the space of Dropbox Pro, for the same price. Im not affiliated or anything, just a satisfied customer. [1] - https://www.dropbox.com/hel…

Dropbox uses Amazon S3, therefore servers are located in Europe as well.

EDIT: maybe my statement was a bit premature. I was confident Amazon was keeping mirrors, but it seems they only do this in the same region. Dropbox runs its own infrastructure network and uses AWS for storing files, both solely in the US.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#60

Post by zschallz »

dreen wrote: post #38

If you are in Europe I recommend hubiC instead of Dropbox. They are much cheaper and have servers in Europe (France - they are child company of OVH). Dropbox only has servers in America [1], so its slower. - 25GB free - 100GB 1€/m - 10TB 10€/m Yes you read that right, its TEN TIMES the space of Dropbox Pro, for the same price. Im not affiliated or anything, just a satisfied customer. [1] - https://www.dropbox.com/hel…

I considered hubiC, but all download syncs (from the website and application) for now are limited to 10mbit (even from the UK). There are several posts complaining about this on hubiC's forums.

If you don't care about this, it's a really great deal, but to me it is a deal breaker.

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