[postalcoder]

I think I've spent more on dropbox, lifetime, than most other subscriptions (it's also the first service i thought was worth paying a subscription for). I still pay for it. Drew built a great service.

On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters. All I care about is packrat and good syncing. Is there anybody that loves anything they've built in the last fifteen years? I feel like the company could have had a skeleton crew keeping the lights on and I wouldn't have noticed a thing.

Now, in 2026, all I want is for my coding agent to be able to grep the files in dropbox. Feel like dropbox will sooner rely on selling merch than offer something useful like that, though.

[MiddleEndian]

>On the other hand, I can't think of a single new feature they've introduced since 2011 that matters.

Honestly that's what I love about it. I work on something on my desktop. Then when I go to my laptop, everything is there too. It's great. When I get another computer I can just enable Dropbox, walk away, and all my projects, notes, pictures, etc. will be there. I pay them some amount of money per month and it just works and I very rarely need to visit the website or even click on the icon in my toolbar.

Sometimes I read notes on my phone and it's kind of annoying that I can't search through text using their app, but I generally consider that to be a problem with Android rather than Dropbox.

[postalcoder]

I generally have not thought about how Dropbox spent its money until I visited the web interface, which has been redesigned for the tenth time over, and remembered that there’s still no way to see how much space your folders are taking up.

[MiddleEndian]

I guess I already know roughly how much space they're taking up since I just check how much space I'm using in my dropbox directory on one of my computers. From my perspective, Dropbox basically has no User Interface, but a fantastic User Experience.

[microtonal]

All I care about is packrat and good syncing.

For me that and end-to-end encryption (I know it's supported for teams now).

Instead they just added more annoyances over time. Every time I logged into the web interface, I would get stupid upselling advertisements (maybe don't badger your paying users with that nonsense)? I replaced the official client by Maestral years ago, because they switched to embedding a web browser, and the AFAIR the client was also trying to do upsells.

My wife were and I were customers for years. But we finally decided to terminate our subscription last year. Mostly because of the constant upgrade nagging + the orange guy taking office and Dropbox not providing E2E encryption on family accounts. So we switched to Proton Drive. It's worse in many ways, but at least it's E2E encrypted and doesn't shove upgrading ads in our faces all the time.

It's sad, Dropbox was really a great product.

[plasticsoprano]

E2E is supported for specific types of folders available only to teams but the admin has to enable it and that folder has to be used. You can't apply it team wide to all users. It's a very poor implementation.

[insanitybit]

If you want E2E, encrypt your data yourself. By far the simplest, safest solution to the problem.

[runtime_terror]

Simplest? How so

[insanitybit]

Using `age` or `rage` is deadly easy. Also, e2e is most effective when it happens out of band - if the idea is "I don't trust Dropbox, so I want client side encryption" then you shouldn't trust them to do the e2e anyways. I realize it can be more complex, but managing it yourself gives you the maximal benefits of e2e.

[runtime_terror]

I agree if you care about security it's better to DIY, it's just not simpler than say putting a file in Proton Drive

[rcbdev]

Why not just use VeraCrypt containers with DropBox until this man of colour that you are scared of leaves their elected office? That way, your files are E2E encrypted via FOSS tooling.

[al_borland]

There is a lot to be said for staying small and doing one thing really, really well. Any time a service I like tries to expand their business, usually to appease investors, that's when things start to go downhill and I start looking for alternatives.

[postalcoder]

> There is a lot to be said for staying small and doing one thing really, really well.

Man. 1Password is another example of this. They've chased growth and no longer seem to be able to build a browser extension that actually works. I've been seriously considering dropping 1PW because of it.

[al_borland]

Funny you bring it up. I was a 1Password user for 18 years and just migrated off it last month when they announced the price hike. It has only been working 50% of the time, and the lack of a reliable auto-fill is a security risk… yet they are raising the price so all their Avenger backers can get a return on their investment. A bunch of movie stars investing in a password manager feels like a huge red flag to me.

I ended up moving to Apple passwords. I really wanted to keep my password manager platform agnostic, but if I’m being a realist, all my stuff is from Apple, they have a history of long-term support, and so far it’s worked great on all the sites 1Password struggled with. There are features I miss, and I did need to manually validate each imported entry and do some manual cleanup, but I was able to transition relatively quickly with a DB of over 400 accounts.

[postalcoder]

I've been side-eyeing a transition to Apple's password manager and it's helpful to know that you have done so with little pain. I may try it soon.

[al_borland]

I didn’t want to go into too much detail if you were thinking a different route, but since you’re thinking of going with Apple, here are some of the rough edges I remember in the transition.

I exported 1Password to a CSV and imported it into Apple Passwords. I had spend some time cleaning up 1PW first, archiving dead accounts, but the export had everything in a flat file, so I had to go through everything in my archive and delete it from Apple PW.

Custom fields and some other special fields aren’t supported in Apple PW, this is where I had to go through one-by-one and make sure I wasn’t missing anything and add those things to the notes area.

Non-password data in 1PW doesn’t fit well into Apple PW, so I used a password protected Apple Notes file for that. Not ideal, but I didn’t use those things too much. For software registrations, I didn’t bother securing those too much and filed them away as txt files, most were really old anyway.

The CSV export made 2FA pretty obvious, so I could set that up with Apple. I want to say it made passkeys obvious too, but I only had 1 and knew what it was.

I cleaned out Apple Passwords before the import, so it only had app passwords for login-with-Apple. The way they do this leave much to be desired, to the point that I don’t want to use that feature anymore.

After the import I also found that it tried to be smart about handling multiple entries for the same site, or tried to intelligently name stuff based on the website. It got most of this right, but I still needed to clean some things up and do a little investigation to figure out what a few things were and fix them. Some of this was due to importing archived stuff. I did have to go back to 1Password to make sense of some of it.

All-in-all, I did it all over a long weekend. I kept 1PW around for a month to see if I’d need it and I never did.

[postalcoder]

Thank you so much for this!

[throwaway219450]

In 2016 they introduced document scanning, and I've used that a lot to digitize old papers, lecture notes, all kinds of things. It works well and has a good UI for tweaking corner locations and other things.

[skydhash]

> All I care about is packrat and good syncing.

That’s also what I care about, but the atrocious client (and the m1 thing) and the constant nagging in the web interface was too much. I cancelled and now use a mixture of icloud, airdrop, and rsync/sftp with remote servers.

[hoherd]

Have you tried syncthing? A few years ago I replaced Dropbox with that on all my computers and it's been great. It works a lot like old school Dropbox, except without the cloud-hosted storage parts. It does p2p sync of directories between computers.

[skydhash]

I have, but for my workflow, I found that I don’t need realtime sync that much. I either work locally or the source of truth is online. What I really needed was backup (restic and various online storage) and file transfer (rsync and unison works great).