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Can we have different plans / price points / data combinations / plan sizes?

Can we have different plans / price points / data combinations / plan sizes?

Michel L.
New member | Level 2

Hi, I find limited in the choices of subscription plans. Basic/free and Pro/110$

I'd gladly pay something like 25$ a year for 50GB and a 2 users family plan.

Considering iCloud have a 12$ plan for 20 GB and 48$ for 200GB, that seems reasonable..

1,095 Comments
Patrick C.13
New member | Level 1

I find it hard to believe that Dropbox would lose money if I paid for a subscription for 50/100/250/500 GB instead of 1TB because a smaller size made sense to me at a lower price point. The loss is in me taking my lesser need for "paid" space to a competing service and Dropbox getting no money at all and no ROI from the couple of years they hosted my 25GB or so of files while I had sponsored free space.

Clearly the company is saying that they don't want smaller users and likely even prefer businesses than personal users looking for online storage. Kind of leaves a "we don't care about you" taste in my mouth that is really disappointing. With so many products out there, the ones with the flexibility to fill customer needs will always win out. 

Final thought - People that get to try products like Dropbox may also be decision makers and influencers at businesses that could use these products. As such each and every customer should be treated as a company's most important customer because without them there is no revenue and no company. Businesses that forget this rule never really grow to the real potential they could achieve.

I am not expecting miracles from anyone reading my words but maybe some reflexion on how sometimes business decisions that seem smart and cost savings in the short term aren't always good decisions...

Rich
Super User II

I find it hard to believe that Dropbox would lose money if I paid for a subscription for 50/100/250/500 GB instead of 1TB because a smaller size made sense to me at a lower price point.

They might make a little money off of you, but think of all the existing Pro users that would downgrade to a smaller plan. That's where they lose the money, and that's what happened the last time they tried it.

Patrick C.13
New member | Level 1

OK so let's go with that argument that if they do so they lose money. So currently, at the top tier (1TB) they get about $10 a month (let's make abstraction of currency). That's about the same going rate as the other big players like Google and Microsoft. So the option right now with Dropbox is an (almost) all or nothing. The "free" space is much lower than the competition or you can pay about the same price as the competition to get in the "Pro" range. So sure, if they added an in-the-middle tier between the two extremes, lower need customers would downgrade. And you could say that at the $2 for 100GB and $4 for 200GB the other guys charge, if you exceed 200GB you are still stuck going to the 1TB pricing as the step up.

But here's the question, what's the percentage of paying customers out there that need to store personal stuff (forget businesses) that exceed 200GB? If I was a betting man I'd probably say that it is much lower than the percentage of people that need to store less than that amount. I can;t say this is an 80/20 rule but logic dictates heavy users are the exception, not the norm.

Now let me explain what I was talking about when I said short term savings versus long term ROI. If you add a lower tier, people paying top dollar that don't need the space downgrade which translates in lower monthly revenues from that group so in essence keeping the higher tier only saves you money as you said. But, if you do add that lower tier, now you can reach to a new audience which is likely much larger that IS interested in paying less for less. So at this point you initially lost money from your current smaller subscriber base and gained a small lower paying subscriber group. Net revenue is likely down - short term. Oh and frankly, if Pro users are using less than 200GB of space as it is, if they are smart they would be running to the competition already and put some money back in their own pockets. 

Let's now think a year or two in the future. You still have competitive pricing compared to your peers in the industry both at higher and lower tiers so you can grow your adopters across both the customers with smaller space needs and the bigger ones too. You are tapping on a smaller market that is willing to pay more and now also tapping into a bigger market paying less and you are no longer driving this larger group away. I am not saying it's an overnight turnaround but at some point things balance themselves out. The beauty too of the business model of providing space is that over time people tend to need more. So a percentage of those lower tier users will naturally migrate to higher tiers. You also now have a bigger customer base which means more market share, better resilience to customer loss, more industry presence etc. You are essentially growing your business footprint which will ultimately grow your revenue while providing a better safety cushion to customer attrition.

And now here's the final step to this - smarter, more competitive pricing. It's not enough to be about the same price and offer about the same tiers. You need to differentiate yourself from the other players and bring in more customers. When we talked numbers above we came to the obvious conclusion that by the time you need more than 200GB you might as well pay for a Pro equivalent price to get 1TB of space and everyone offers the same model at that price point. Instead of just giving a year one 20% discount for new Pro customers, start incentifying the people looking for that amount of space and offer that discount yearly for annual subscriptions. It makes the price cheaper than the competition and yearly users are less likely to look for alternate cloud services to spend money if you don't drive them away. OK so now how do you differentiate yourself to you lower volume users? Simple. Create a tier no one offers and price it competitively. An example would be 500GB for $6 a month. Again, throw in a discount for annual subscriptions. All these things drive customers to you and away from your competition and the customer volumes will drive up revenue. And since you cost per GB is higher on the lower tier you actually would have better margins on those sales.

So all that to say that while I understand why some Dropbox number crunchers decided that the single Pro tier was the way to go from free to paid, I think it was too reactive a decision, not looking at the bigger picture of what a larger user base brings over time. 

Off the soapbox now... 

Rick_M
Experienced | Level 13

A business model that prices "tiers" will over time discover that competition in the middle and at the high end requires the pricing to compress and eventually to add a new top-tier and either drop the bottom tier or just make the bottom tier a free-trial or come-and-see type of thing.

As Patrick suggests there are other types of short term moves that can be made, such as loyalty-rewards (in discounts or performance), but the emphasis there is "short term."

 

Rudy M.5
New member | Level 1

Dropbox,

I just wanted to let you know that I buy storage from MICROSOFT - OneDrive.

 

100 GB for start. If that is not enough I upgrade to 200 GB. The money I NOT spend for 1TB until I actually need it is mine and not yours!

Best regards,

Rudy

 

 

DaveC2
New member | Level 1

Like we care rudy?

Rudy M.5
New member | Level 1

@Dave

Who are you Dave? Are you somebody I was addressing in my post? Was somebody talking to you?

I just hope Dropbox will read this one day, but that is not your business anyway.

Clarity A.
New member | Level 1

How and when was a smaller account vs 1Tb trialled? I've never been offered any such thing by Dropbox in several years of use.

I'd happily spend a few bucks a month for, say, 100Gb. Instead, with my free 25Gb HTC promo ending now, I'm going to trim my Dropbox folder to under 2Gb again. So if it costs $50 P.A. to run my, and all our, free 2Gbs then they're not a corp I'd buy shares in long term.

And if people downgraded from $10/1Tb a month when offered a lower price package, surely what that is is a great big indicator that they're selling people packages that don't suit them. 

Dropbox, offer me even just 50Gb for about $4/£3 a month and you've got my money.

Mark
Super User II

How and when was a smaller account vs 1Tb trialled? I've never been offered any such thing by Dropbox in several years of use.

 

It hasn't been trialled with 1TB - but thats just going to exasperate the issue. 

 

And if people downgraded from $10/1Tb a month when offered a lower price package, surely what that is is a great big indicator that they're selling people packages that don't suit them. 

 

Or, that they are making a huge profit margin and on to a good business idea? 

Same way as why buy a BMW when you can have a Kia? They do the same thing after all. I cant imagine walking into the BMW garage and using that example above would get me far.

Dropbox, offer me even just 50Gb for about $4/£3 a month and you've got my money.

And mine! Although it would mean them losing £6 off me a month.  

chris d.23
New member | Level 1

While they may lose money off you if you downgraded they would gain many more subscribers who don't need all that space. 

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