[avnfish]

I recently migrated from Dropbox to Google One. I find Dropbox's personal pricing really baffling: you get 2 GB for free or have to move all the way up to 2 TB and pay £100 a year. 100GB for £16 via Google is a much more sensible offer.

[SkyPuncher]

My perception is Dropbox is trying to shed personal users to shift to enterprise accounts.

[Jolter]

Yes. What are their nag screens about, if not to convince me as a free user to leave?

[hbn]

Google One's tiers are better, but they're still kinda nonsense. The first 2 paid tiers are 100GB and 200GB which are fine. But then you have to jump up 3.5x the cost to 2TB. Why can't they just offer finely-tuned increments of 100GB? Or even 50GB or 25GB.

I'm mindful with what I put on cloud storage (mainly photo/video backups with Google Photos). I'm fine bumping up as I use more, but I don't feel like you suddenly deserve to pay for 2TB cause you went 3MB over the 200GB limit. And for how cheap as storage is these days, I think the pricing models should be reconsidered.

[gizmo]

I never understand this kind of moralistic thinking about pricing. If you get more storage than you need for a price you're willing to pay you should be happy. You get the storage you need and then some.

I pay for Netflix and I watch less than 2 movies a month. Am I angry because I'm paying for the right to watch multiple movies/shows every day which I will never have time for? No. I get what I want for a price I'm willing to pay.

Every time you buy a piece of software or hardware you get features you don't care about. Do I get angry that these features are included? Of course not. I just don't use them.

But somehow when it comes to quotas people feel like the price should somehow correspond to the cost of delivering the service. But it doesn't. It's just price segmentation, and as long as the pricing tiers are clearly advertised I don't think you have any right to be mad.

[hbn]

Those examples you gave are totally different. The service they're offering is renting out storage space on their servers. The most logical way to price that is to determine what dollar amount they want to charge to rent out X amount of space and just let me choose how many chunks of that I want to rent. It's not like when you pay for 2TB they physically reserve it for you like a plot of land. They're only actually giving you 2TB of storage space if you're using all of it.

[gizmo]

For services like these, whether it's Google One or Dropbox, R&D is the major expense. Not hard drive space. In order to recoup the R&D cost you have to segment customers by their willingness to pay. When you charge per GB you leave a lot of money on the table.

Google has spent billions in R&D for gmail, google docs/sheets, photos. And now I have to choose between deleting my old stuff or paying for extra storage. Figuring out where my data went is too much work, so I subscribed. Other people will delete old photos/attachments/files so they don't have to upgrade to the next pricing tier. Price segmentation works.

[hbn]

I mean I'm not arguing that I shouldn't have to pay. I just think the tiers and prices are bad.

If I had a car that could hold my family of 4, and then I have another kid and my only option to upgrade from there is a school bus, I'm gonna be understandably annoyed. And you could just as easily say "well they don't make enough on cars so they need more people buying buses."

[kiratp]

It’s pretty simple. Selling storage is a crap margin business. The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers. They only make money when you upgrade and buy more storage than what you use.

They don’t want to sell you a cheap commodity. They want to sell you convenience at higher margin.

[hbn]

> The provider makes no money on selling you those lower tiers.

Is that true? I'd be shocked if it costs Google more than $2/month to have the average 100GB user's files sitting in storage. Maybe if I was constantly uploading and downloading, but most people push things up there and then they just sit.

[kiratp]

Yup - its 100 GB * 3 (well * 2.5 to 2.7 with erasure coding) + networking, power etc. etc. etc. Data is constantly being churned around as machines are serviced/die, disks are scrubbed for bit flips etc. and its not like you can put it on a tape on a shelf - the user expects it to be instantly accessible.

Google Cloud Storage is $0.02/ GB + a myriad of other charges for listing, accessing, replication etc. All while storage remains one of the lower margin offerings for the hyperscale clouds - they keep it cheap to attract high margin compute.

Now add to that the cost of building and maintaining the myriad of apps, APIs, integrations etc. for a consumer facing storage service and $2/mo for 100GB would be very very slightly profitable at best.

[passion__desire]

You want per mb pricing like AWS has per second billing on their EC2 machines?

[hbn]

I mean that would be ideal, if it reasonably scaled as I uploaded/deleted.

But I'd be fine with more reasonable increments in steps of X smaller amount of GB.

[AH4oFVbPT4f8]

Do you worry about Google dropping and discontinuing the service ?

[hbn]

Not really for Google Drive. I feel like they have too many enterprise customers using it to be able to just pull the rug on it. And Google Photos is essentially just a photo-specific UI for Drive.

If they did actually kill it, I can always export and move somewhere else, though it'd be a pain in the ass. In the meantime, it's like the only Google product I think is actually good and worth paying for.

[Sohcahtoa82]

This is exactly why I switched to Google One.

I needed about 20 GB of storage. Why the hell should I have to pay for 100 times that?

Since I switched, I've slowly grown to 30 GB, but I still have plenty of room before I need to go to the next tier and pay another $1/month.

[hotpotamus]

This is what got me to get rid of Dropbox. Used them for free for a decade, and they pushed me out by limiting the number of clients. I looked for a paid option for $10-$20 per year since I basically only need a few GBs of space, but they don't have that. So figured I might as well move to my own Nextcloud instance. It's actually still free since I'm using Oracle Cloud's free tier, though of course there's my admin time, but I actually sort of enjoy that.

[starky]

Dropbox lost me years ago when they removed the 15GB or whatever limit I had with bonus space. I got the message about what they wanted and uninstalled when they started hounding me through app notifications to pay for extra space because I only had "__ MB" of space remaining.

Oh well, between Amazon syncing my photos as part of Prime and GDrive I have plenty of cloud storage for my needs.

[great_psy]

Shouldn’t those prices be affected by moores law ?

I think I remember the tier prices being roughly the same since the service came out.

I get that salaries went up which adds to price, but over time it feels like storage price should go towards zero.

[vikingerik]

This comes up all the time regarding Dropbox, why can't you pay less for a less-storage tier?

The answer is you're not really paying for the storage. You're paying for the servicing. The application with its network connectivity and data transfer, plus the overhead costs of billing and support when necessary.

The proposition may look like "$100 for 10 TB", but that's not a ratio that you can halve or whatever. It's $100 for 10 TB and all the network servicing and support apparatus, which doesn't change if the storage amount does.

It's not that Dropbox couldn't offer a tier for less than 100/year, it's that they don't want to. We around HN know about reducing headaches by avoiding pathologically cheap customers. Dropbox makes more profit overall by getting some of the would-be cheapos to round up to 100/year and letting the rest walk.

[great_psy]

But that argument works the other way around as well.

If the software is already built, it would be the same dev cost to offer 50gb, or 10TB.

Sure there might be some customer support issues that don’t scale the same way, but then why not only offer customer support for higher tiers ?

[brianwawok]

They don't have the scale of customers to profit from £16. Compare how many people in the world use google per day vs dropbox.

When you have less scale, you need to charge a bit more for your initial level.

[baby]

I’m thinking of doing the same, especially as the Dropbox app doesn’t sync on iPhone whereas google photos do. But Ive delayed the migration for years as its too much of a pain

[ramraj07]

I would recommend staying out simply because I trust google less with my primary data store backup than I do Dropbox. Especially with the risk of account locking.