[iUsedToCode]

Dropbox is cool and all, but i hate their pricing model. I just want to keep about 50-100 GB there (i don't hoard stuff). I don't wanna pay $10 / month for that. At backblaze i pay less than $0.5 / month. I could pay quadruple, since Dropbox is a lot better service (and quite a different one, too). But not 20 times as much.

I know that Dropbox doesn't care about my tiny dollars and all. But why not let customers pay for what they use? This "constant growth" bullshit is probably the reason they don't care.

[mgkimsal]

what bugged me about their pricing model (perhaps it's changed?) is that things people share with me count to my cap. I had a client share stuff with me via dropbox. So I signed up. I get "2 gig free!" Yay. Another client shares stuff with me. Then another. Then another. Then I'm at my 2gig cap with just other peoples' stuff. They all think it's great, because none of them are paying for it. I needed to pay money to support their free use of the service, and I declined. Just one more $x/month service I didn't need to get hooked to. Maybe the pricing model has changed what they count now?

[kungito]

How do you have "clients" and you can't afford 10$ a month to not have to think about it?

[mgkimsal]

It was largely the principal of the thing. It's yet another $x/month, on top of other services being paid for to help service/manage those clients. Example - PM tools. I'm already paying for project management tools - put the files there, damnit. "oh, but I like dragging to my dropbox!". Oh, and someone else uses box.com, and so on.

Again, what gets my goat is partially the payment, but mostly the "it's free for them, but I end up needing to pay to accommodate their use of the service" angle. If they - other parties - were paying for it first, it would bother me less. But raving about how 'free' a tool is which I have to pay for to work with them (and they're using it precisely because it's free) bugs me.

Getting sucked in to a few more $x/month things here and there 1) dilutes where stuff is supposed to live (wrt files) and 2) just becomes a drag on finances. A handful of services can end up going from several hundred dollars in to the thousands if you don't keep tabs on things.

Maybe I'm an HN failure because saving several hundred dollars per year matters to me? I guess my skills must suck - most people can apparently rustle up $300/hr Rust/Go/Elixir project work simply by starting to formulate the idea that they're considering taking project work. I'm not that skilled.