Dropbox is discontinuing unlimited storage for its business-oriented Advanced plan due to abuse by some customers.
The company, which has more than 18 million paying users worldwide, explained its decision in a blog post, saying it's noticed a growing number of customers buying Advanced subscriptions "not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases, or even instances of reselling storage."
It claimed that in recent months, such conduct has increased on the platform, in part because rival providers had begun to implement similar storage policy modifications.
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"We've observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers," Dropbox explained. "Importantly, our Advanced policy has always been to provide as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case."
It stated that trying to control the problem by constantly monitoring "acceptable" and "unacceptable" use scenarios was not a practical answer, thus it opted to discontinue the "as much space as you need" policy and transition to a metered model.
So, how will the new system function in the future? Customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of team-shareable storage space, which Dropbox describes as "enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos, or 7500 hours of HD video," with each additional active license providing 5TB of storage.
More than 99% of Advanced customers currently using less than 35TB of storage per license will be able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using at the time they are notified of the changes, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for five years with no additional fees charged to their current plan, according to the company.
Meanwhile, customers who use 35TB or more of storage per license can keep using their current storage amount, up to a total of 1,000TB, at no additional cost to their existing plan, and Dropbox will contact them "to discuss a range of options" involving a suitable limited-storage plan.
New users who require more storage space will be able to purchase storage add-ons beginning September 18 and current customers beginning November 1 for $10 per month or $96 per year.
New users who require more storage space will be able to purchase storage add-ons beginning September 18 and current customers beginning November 1 for $10 per month or $96 per year.