Family plan is too expensive for what it offers

I have used Dropbox for over a decade. I love it! My wife and I share my personal account, use it extensively, and plan to keep using it for so long as Dropbox continues to be as fantastic as it is. I've experimented with Box, iCloud, Onedrive, and Google Drive and I like Dropbox much better than any of these 4. Price is the only barrier. But . . .

I have rarely paid anything to Dropbox because it is so expensive. Perhaps this more detailed feedback of our situation will give you some ideas for how you could survey your customers to see if it is worth your while to come down on pricing and make up for it with volume. In detail:

In December 2009 I signed up for a $50/year 20GB plan. Dropbox discontinued that plan in July 2012. For being such an early, loyal, paying customer, they gave me 19GB free to keep forever in addition to various bonuses I earned. This probably paid off for Dropbox in the long run as I referred a few other customers over the years and I also got a small business to sign up for Dropbox in 2019.

The pricing on Dropbox for business is very reasonable and it felt like a minor cost that happened to provide huge value to that business as everyone worked at a different location. They are still using Dropbox.

IMHO, the pricing on the personal side remains high relative to the value received, the competition, and what a typical family is able/willing to pay. We would jump into a family plan for $10/month in a heartbeat. It would replace the cumbersome shared Dropbox account with my wife which is chronically on the verge of running out of space. But more importantly, we have a pressing need to backup photos/videos from our teen son's iPhone and we are having discussions between 3 options:

1) backup to one of our Macs - free but time consuming and cumbersome because of how Apple lets you (or doesn't let you) do it.

2) get iCloud for $3/month which will be enough storage for him for at least a year but probably within 2 years he'll go over the 200GB and require the $10/month plan for 2TB. All iCloud plans include family sharing.

3) Get Dropbox at $17/month.

If Dropbox for family were $10/month, my wife and I would not be discussing this. We'd already have it. Instead, we are having a hard time figuring out what to do.

My wife argues we should avoid iCloud since Apple has a habit of doing funny things with your data (like getting rid of meta data on music from CDs you purchased and imported into iTunes, or making it difficult to get to outside Apple's eco-system. She thinks we should just backup onto iPhotos on a Mac until Dropbox lowers its price on the family plan which she thinks will inevitably happen as that price just seems too high for most families.

I have no idea if or when Dropbox will drop their family plan price and I don't like how Apple makes it so complicated to backup photos/videos from an iPhone, so I've been arguing for the simple iCloud route at $3/month (Apple makes everything complicated unless you just use their iCloud).

If someone from Dropbox is listening - please just change your price to $10/month on family or at most $12/month. At $17/month, you make this a tough decision for people - and people like us are probably going to pass. At $10/month, it's a no-brainer because it would be the same storage and family sharing as iCloud but a much better product that works seamlessly on many different systems.

We are only a data point of 1, but . . .

If Dropbox dropped it's price to $120/year or $12/month if you don't pay the whole year in advance, I can tell you for sure that we'd sign up. We'd stop being a free 22.8GB customer and become a paying $10/month customer for many years to come.