Dropbox Ends its Unlimited Cloud Storage Option, Here’s Why

Dropbox ends its unlimited cloud storage option for its business-oriented Advanced plan because it’s had enough of some users abusing the offering. The company claimed that a growing number of customers have been buying Advanced subscriptions “not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage.”

Dropbox Ends its Unlimited Cloud Storage Option, Here’s Why

“We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers,” Dropbox said. “Importantly, our policy for Advanced has always been to provide as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case.”

The company is trying to manage the situation by constantly monitoring “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases. As a result, it decided to end the “as much space as you need” policy and move to a metered model.

Now, starting this week, customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shareable by a team. Dropbox describes this as enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos, or 7500 hours of HD video. Moreover, each additional active license will offer 5TB of storage.

Meanwhile, the small number of customers using 35TB or more of storage per license can continue to use their current storage amount. They can use up to a total of 1,000TB at no additional cost to their existing plan. Dropbox will contact them “to discuss a range of options” involving a suitable limited-storage plan.

New customers will be able to buy storage add-ons from September 18 and existing customers from November 1 at 1TB for $10 per month or $96 per year.

Dropbox said it will gradually migrate existing customers to the new policy on November 1. The company also promised to notify everyone at least 30 days before their planned migration date.

See Also: Dropbox Spaces Bring Important Improvement for Teamwork