I think you’re both right because the original poster left out competition. It’s one thing to take free back, it’s another thing to do it when people can easily replace your product without paying.
Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it.
Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.
> Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use.
Maybe not completely free, but iCloud desktop sync is pretty much a native MacOS clone of Dropbox. Especially for its core feature of cross-device syncing. Perhaps less so for sharing, although MacOS has been slowly adding those features to the point where I no longer get much value out of dropbox at all.
Still paying though, mostly out of laziness to migrate (which is literally as simple as dragging the files into a folder on my desktop, honestly I’m not sure why I haven’t done this yet)
Google drive and Dropbox don’t really have the same functionality. Google really wants you to use a web browser; in my experience the filesystem integration has always been flaky. Whereas Dropbox directories that appear in the local filesystem are really solid.
On the Mac OS that functionality has always been flakey, through several rewrites, not just bug fixes. About half the time it’s not syncing (often due to crashing, but sometimes just mysteriously) on my completely vanilla macos laptop. Dropbox “just works”.
Google Drive's yearly cost for 2TB is almost equal to monthly payment for Dropbox for the same capacity.
However, Dropbox have some underrated yet very powerful features like Apps and automations. I buy books from plethora of places, and new versions of the products I have are uploaded automatically. I just receive a notification. Same for some fonts and design assets I have. SendOwl leverages this capability for anyone, easily.
Auto organization, a clunky but reliable native Linux application, LANSync, etc. are all good things to have, and they have solved the syncing problem.
Also, Google Drive is a ticking time bomb, because if you accidentally put a file Google doesn't like, you have the risk to lose all your Google access at the middle of the night.
- Dropbox: $119.88 per year for 2TB, plus $39.99 per year for one year version history.
- Google Drive: ~$11.3 per year for 2TB, ~$57 per year for 5TB.
Dropbox doesn’t have a competitor that is free to use. At least as far as I know. You can get your disk space in a lot of ways, some bundled with other products you may use making it appear “free” but even if you host your own cloud storage you’re going to pay something for it.
Even if Evernote is better than notes on your iPhone, is it $10 a month better? Probably not.