[ianl]

Sounds like a round for the founders and employees to sell some shares (called a series f?), unless Dropbox has some major expansion planned to build its own CDN and data centres instead of using S3. The amount of savings at there scale (200 million new files / day [1]) would be huge as data via S3 is already more expensive then running your own bare metal boxes. I would imagine that Dropbox pays some sort of bulk price, but I can't find any information.

I don't think the 5 billion dollar valuation is out of the ball park considering that they solve a problem that a lot of people encounter including my mother. Their solution is simple and elegant and seems to work. Last statistics I heard they had 25 million users [1] and growing, while I dont know how many of those users are active subscribers I can imagine the conversion ratio is much higher then normal freemium products.

While there has been a lot of anti-Dropbox news in the tech press lately, we need to remember we live in an information bubble that doesn't reach the normal user.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/17/billion-dollar-valuatio-clu...

[bdonlan]

> I would imagine that Dropbox pays some sort of bulk price, but I can't find any information.

Storage pricing is right there on the S3 pricing page: http://aws.amazon.com/s3/#pricing

Assuming they're at the highest tiers, we're looking at about $0.055/gb storage, $0.050/gb transfer out, $0 transfer in. Transfer out could certainly be less, though, if they're in the >524TB/mo range.

[natrius]

I'd bet that Dropbox is that largest S3 user in existence. Custom rates are very likely.

[EliAndrewC]

Netflix also uses Amazon S3 and is probably an even larger customer, but I agree with your assessment that custom rates are very likely (for both of them).

[jonknee]

Netflix uses EC2 for computing power. It uses CDNs (Level 3 and Akamai mostly) to deliver streams so most of the bandwidth would not be from Amazon.

[peterb]

I also wonder if they are selling shares because Microsoft is nipping at their heels. Live Mesh is a serious contender and starts with 5G instead of 2G. I switched.

[rjbond3rd]

Hmm, interesting. I've never heard of it.

EDIT: Apparently it only works on Windows, so I'll be sticking with Dropbox.

EDIT: Thanks, I had missed the Mac option. But to me, they cheapen their Live Mesh brand by association with Windows Live ID and Hotmail.

[peterb]

Windows and OSX, but not iOS (yet) or Linux (probably never).

[seabee]

Windows Live is the online brand, all their free-download software/online services are "Windows Live X". I'm not sure how it cheapens it any more than if it was "Microsoft X" or "iProduct"...

[rjbond3rd]

Okay, I should rephrase: when I see Hotmail so prominently featured on the Windows Live ID page, I worry because of Hotmail's spammy past.

Also, the only times I've encountered Windows Live ID are times when it was being forced on me. E.g., when I got my broadband, I was forced to use a Windows-only CD to install a lot of (to me: irrelevant, useless, copycat) consumer software (photo sharing etc.), then get a Windows Live ID, and then finally activate the broadband.

So I pulled a Windows machine from a dumpster, did the install, got the Live ID, activated the broadband and then installed Linux. It felt dirty (and not from the dumpster).

After activation, the Live ID was not required, nor the software, nor Windows. So the whole experience was dictated and had no value for me, the customer.

[Joakal]

There's a difference between 200 million new files and 200 million 'uploaded' files.

eg a song has a fingerprint. If 100 other users 'upload' the same song, it's counted towards their usage but no actual upload or storage is performed, saving costs.

Pretty clever on their part :)

[blantonl]

Pretty clever on their part :)

It is actually pretty standard. Deduplication is a very common method for not duplicating the same content on shared storage.

[Joakal]

OT: How do you add italics to text? I find it preferable than adding >s.

[patrickk]

You may find these helpful, the formatting options for HN:

http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

[edanm]

Put asterisks around the text: *your text (and another asterisk - can't put one or my text will be italicized!).

[ianl]

Yes it is very clever, I had forgotten they ensure they only store unique files (I wonder what percentage of files "saved" are unique). I actually went and looked through the TechCrunch articles from April 17th that announced the Dropbox 25m user mark and 200 million file saves but it doesn't distinguish between unique and saved files. I imagine its the latter as it would be the more impressive number.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/17/dropbox-hits-25-millions-us...

[eru]

About the percentage of unique files: I guess if you go by volume, the percentage of unique files is small. And if you go by number, the percentage of unique files is big.

I.e. bigger files are more likely to be stuff that you didn't make yourself.

[qq66]

Until you get to home video. Which is growing very quickly.

[eru]

Indeed. I wonder whether pre-fabricated files will grow in size, too, or whether the ratio will eventually shift.