[Moseman23]

Pretty simple: they pay a gazillion dollars to host everyone's pictures and old resume versions, they get half a gazillion from enterprise customers storing work documents. They reduced a lot of costs by building their own data centers and getting off AWS.

[jpalomaki]

For example BackBlaze sells storage at $0.005/GB [1]. I picked them as an example, because I'm fairly confident their business model is based on making money with this. Based on this I would assume that at Dropbox scale you could do storage at least for the same price, maybe even cheaper. With those prices the free user storage would cost like max 1 cent/month. There's of course some users with more than 2GB, but there's also many who use less and all the de-duplication and shared folders pushing down the per free-user cost.

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html

[ktamura]

I analyzed Backblaze's business model before. It's quite fascinating. https://twitter.com/kiyototamura/status/934558071019339776

If I had to guess, Dropbox improves their margin by getting people to share files and folders (because that counts toward multiple users' quotas).

[bdcravens]

I pay $10/mo for the storage bump. Not sure how many there are like me, but I suspect a non-trivial amount of their revenue comes from non-enterprise customers.