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Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

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Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#61

Post by aidos »

rootinier wrote: post #59
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.

Do they use the European servers? It would be a lot more expensive from their point of view.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#62

Post by furyg3 »

aianus wrote: post #53
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.

Yes, if you're in Germany your programming is for Germany whether or not you have a US or German account.

The bad news is that you'll have to use a VPN to pretend to be from some other country (US) in order to get some of the shows not offered in your own country (Germany).

The good news is that you can use a VPN to register for Netflix (and pay less!) and get the same content as you would get if you registered in Germany.

The last time I checked some Netflix features (watch list?) were disabled if you are 'traveling' outside your region.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#63

Post by Lazare »

rootinier wrote: post #59
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.

That doesn't follow in the slightest. Just because AWS has data centres around the world, it doesn't follow that Dropbox is using them.

Do you have any sort of cite for your claim? Because the link in the comment you're replying to suggests that they store everything purely in the US.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#64

Post by zuck9 »

rootinier wrote: post #59
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.

They don't use S3 now. That was way long ago.

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8233622

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#65

Post by _delirium »

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…

There are a handful of things like videogames where that's true as part of the region-based market segmentation, but I haven't found it to be true in general. Cloud services in particular are usually priced so that the dollar and Euro prices are approximate conversions of each other. Look at, say, the $ vs € pricing for Azure, or for OVH.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#66

Post by rootinier »

zuck9 wrote: post #64
rootinier wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They don't use S3 now. That was way long ago. Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8233622

Sync a file via Dropbox and run lsof -i, and you get something like this: ec2-54-221-232-10.compute-1.amazonaws.com:https

EDIT: it may be that they use EC2 for their infrastructure, but not for actually storing files. But they still use AWS.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#67

Post by smnrchrds »

gadders wrote: post #43
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…

And typically $300 converts to £300 which is even worse.

Yet it never converts to CAD $300

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#68

Post by skrause »

rootinier wrote: post #59
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.

Dropbox transfers everything to the USA even if you are in Europe (I checked that with Wiresharks and traceroute). Because of that my main issue with Dropbox was always speed: Uploads and downloads were almost never higher than 500-700 kB/s even though my connection can do much more.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#69

Post by cookiecaper »

I was going to sign up for this on Friday, but it makes you buy a minimum of 5 licenses, so the lowest monthly payment is $75. I thought that was pretty lame so I started looking for something else. I tried ownCloud but it was not very happy with my PHP configuration so I quit that and ended up using Synology's Cloud Station and port-forwarding it. Costs $0 extra to me since I already have a Synology NAS, local storage, easy configuration that doesn't interfere with any existing services, and clients for mobile, Mac, and Linux (GUI only unfortunately).

All of that would've been avoided if I could've just paid Dropbox $30/mo, but I guess I'm glad they priced themselves out by trying to force me to pay for 3 users that I'm not going to have for a long time.

Re: Weird pricing of Dropbox Pro

#70

Post by AverageBanana »

blowski wrote: post #21
kloktier wrote: post #9

http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro vs. http://store.apple.com/de/buy-mac/macbook-pro Same concept. You can't have the price of good fluctuating all the time in Europe because the relationship between the dollar and euro have changed. They fix the price, it accounts for VAT and sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less.

> the relationship between the dollar and euro have changed The Euro has never gone below $1.17, and has averaged at around $1.32 since Dropbox launched in 2008. > it accounts for VAT Dropbox don't pay VAT in the EU. https://www.dropbox.com/help/971

The whole area of VAT in the EU, for companies like Dropbox, changes on January 1, 2015. Dropbox will not be able to state that they don't pay VAT in the EU after this date as the rules will have changed. They will have to start paying VAT based on where their customer is located in the EU, e.g. German Dropbox customers will have to pay German VAT (19%). Hungarian Dropbox customers, meanwhile, will have to pay Hungarian VAT (27%). Dropbox will have to decide whether to pass on the price differential or absorb it. Interesting times.
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