[yodon]

> why hasn't someone outdone Dropbox with a $5/a month offering?

Because Dropbox and Wufoo have huge barriers to entry that new competitors must overcome in order to succeed.

Dropbox is a collaboration tool. The benefit to users of a collaboration tool is generally described as the square of the number of users. Even if you have a bigger constant multiplier out front, that n^2 factor is a barrier to entry you will have a very hard time overcoming as a competitor of Dropbox. Electron as a service has no such n^2 multiplier, so it's competitors will be able to threaten them long after launch.

Wufoo lacks the n^2 in number of users multiplier that Dropbox has but it still has a multiplier that is at least linear, maybe higher, in the number of 3rd party integrations of their product (if the typical Wufoo user wants to integrate it with one app or technology, it's linear, if the typical Wufoo user wants to integrate with two or three other apps or technologies it's n^2 or n^3 in number of integrations, my guess is the actual number is something like n^1.5). Wufoo is big enough that there are many thousands of products and blog posts that integrate with it, making one click integration possible in many cases and "follow this step by step tutorial" integrations possible in countless others. Any new competitor will have a very hard time unseating Wufoo because of the difficulty in overcoming these network effects. Again, Electron as a service has no such network effects, at least as marketed today.

When people talk about "barriers to entry," network effects like these (having to do with either number of users or number of integrations) are generally the main things they are talking about.