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Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

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Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#61

Post by niftich »

tspike wrote: post #46
niftich wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your usecase, Prime Photos [1] from Amazon, where they meld the traditional album and folder metaphors with auto-classifying ML -- the latter which you can luckily turn off if it creeps you out, unlike with Google. But this is an under-served market and many people would pay to some paltry amount a month to have their family photos (or professional photographs) kept safe in the Cloud. Unfortunately most cloud sto…

This looks interesting, I wasn't aware Amazon had entered this space. I'm not sure I trust Amazon either, but at least they're explicit in their desire to take my money in exchange for products and services. Edit: it doesn't appear to provide any ability to organize photos yourself?

For the time being you can freely switch two different interfaces for the same backend: Prime Photos and Amazon Drive [1]. It's clunky. Cloud Drive was their first pass, Photos is their second and is barely a few months old, and I'm not whether the old interface will be disabled for Photos users at some point.

The uncertainty about the product direction is a bit off-putting, but it works decently well for my use-case [2], even if now you can't get that particular tier without Prime.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/home [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12709221#12709936

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#62

Post by slyzmud »

bsharitt wrote: post #12

Being the one cloud service that sync across Linux, Windows, OS X with a native client, Dropbox is the service I'd like to give money for about 100GB of space for a couple of bucks a month, but I just don't need 1TB for $10 a month. So instead I use Google and wait in vain for a native Linux client that's probably never coming.

As a linux user I use, Resilio Sync (formely Bittorrent Sync) with a VPS on serverhub.com . I pay $15 a year per 125 GB. It might not be as good as dropbox but the price worth it. I can even store the files encrypted. (I am not affiliated with neither Resilio sync or serverhub, just a happy user)

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#63

Post by lancewiggs »

mikeevans wrote: post #10
toomuchtodo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay $100/year for Pro. Cheaper and easier to have 1TB of remote storage than SD cards, USB sticks, etc, and no excessive bandwidth charges such that AWS has. EDIT: I don't care if my files are encrypted. EDIT 2: Dropbox sync is rock solid. Every experience with the Google Drive sync client has been trash. I can (and do) pay for convenience.

Any reason that you use it over Google Drive?

1: Trust: Google is primarily in the business of search, and Google Drive is one of many other products that Google has. The company has a history of deleting or ignoring products that are not performing, or even that are performing but not core. Meanwhile Google's core business or searching anything and everything makes their motivations for GDrive suspect. I moved my email from Google long ago for similar reasons.

2: Salience: Dropbox is in the business of providing the Dropbox service - and everything else is non-core. So if I pay for my service at Dropbox I would expect to be more important to them than to Google, who make far more income from advertisers. Meanwhile Google is famous for being hard to do business with for customers of all levels.

3: Simplicty: Dropbox just works, and very elegantly. It's the product of choice for a very large number of people and SMEs and getting it working outside of a corporate network is easy. Meanwhile Google products (and Hangouts is the worst here) are often inaccessibly appalling to operate for people who are not deliberately immersed in the Google ecosystem.

It's not perfect. I would like to see a far higher standard of security from Dropbox, and wish they had not wasted so much effort on non-core functions like photos. This trend appears to be getting worse - with the article stating "Dropbox intends to offer software that businesspeople use for hours each day to create content and get work done."

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#64

Post by pb »

chollida1 wrote: post #2

I talked to a friend just before Christmas whose firm made a good portion of their returns on the insight that VC firms, IPO participants and the market in general all have gaps in how they evaluate the worth of a company and the fact that this gap has grown significantly in the past 5 years. Previously, companies went public much sooner and you could expect a match, not an exact one, but in the same ball park, betwe…

VCs don't get to take their profits until after the company exits. If they invest at a high valuation and then it IPOs at some lower price, there is no gain and the VC gets zero carry.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#65

Post by ohazi »

apetresc wrote: post #58
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro is $8.25 / month for 1TB on annual billing. I rarely see monthly pricing for under 5$. So, I don't think it's going to drop much at this point. https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison?_tk=dbv1 IMO, 1TB is completly reasonble. You can get ~10 GB of storage several places for free which covers most things and minmaxing 2-3$ per month is generally a waste of time.

What a lot of us want is more granularity. I'm totally fine with their per-GB pricing, but if I (as a personal user) want more than 1TB, it is literally impossible to buy it from Dropbox. I would have to upgrade to a business plan, which makes no sense as I'm not a business. Basically, there are only 3 Dropbox tiers: 0, 1TB, or infinity.

I gave up and just started using AWS S3 directly. I use a few GB, pay a few pennies for storage, a few more pennies for bandwidth if I'm moving stuff around, and that's it. I've never paid more than $10/month, and it's usually under $1/month.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#66

Post by Yrlec »

I'd be very surprised if Dropbox manages to IPO at $10B valuation. The growth simply isn't there. They're big on platforms and markets with no growth but they're getting killed in growth markets. E.g. my cloud storage startup Degoo recently surpassed Dropbox on the Android grossing rank in India (http://imgur.com/HsII1KK) and we're only 5 people.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#67

Post by Retric »

apetresc wrote: post #58
Retric wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pro is $8.25 / month for 1TB on annual billing. I rarely see monthly pricing for under 5$. So, I don't think it's going to drop much at this point. https://www.dropbox.com/business/plans-comparison?_tk=dbv1 IMO, 1TB is completly reasonble. You can get ~10 GB of storage several places for free which covers most things and minmaxing 2-3$ per month is generally a waste of time.

What a lot of us want is more granularity. I'm totally fine with their per-GB pricing, but if I (as a personal user) want more than 1TB, it is literally impossible to buy it from Dropbox. I would have to upgrade to a business plan, which makes no sense as I'm not a business. Basically, there are only 3 Dropbox tiers: 0, 1TB, or infinity.

Dropbox is not charging per GB because they don't really pay per GB. Their model depends on people not having a lot of original content so you might have some home movies or whatnot but if you upload 500GB the bulk of that is probably 3rd party games / Movies etc.

So really, most people are buying With that in mind the number of people with more than 1TB to store either need a streaming service or actually have original content which breaks their model.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#68

Post by eigenvalue »

curiousDog wrote: post #3

Dropbox is one of those products that is just a pleasure to use (like Stripe). Sync works seamlessly. I've tried all other alternatives and gotten back to being a paid customer of Dropbox. I think it also boils down to most of your employees being passionate, smart folks from MIT, CMU and the like. Good luck to them with the IPO.

I generally like Dropbox, but they made a change which has really annoyed me and made me like them much less. You used to be able to have a folder of html files in your public folder, index them with another html file, and then generate a bit.ly URL pointing to the index file. Boom, instant website for sharing things with a handful of people. They deprecated that funcionality and now several sites I made like that don't work, which is incredibly annoying. Not sure what that got that besides alienating power users.

Re: Dropbox Could Have One of 2017’s Most Interesting IPOs

#69

Post by yueq »

Dropbox is anti-SaaS -- it expects users will have more 'files' and use more storage, but users are actually moving to SaaS services where the concept of files just doesn't exist.

Many usages from hackernews readers are too techy and not for consumers -- like cross-platform or using as git repo. iCloud, Google Photos, Facebook and YouTube took majority of consumer storage needs aka large photos and videos.

I think enterprise market is their best bet but Box /Google/Microsoft are dominating in this space.

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