Cloud storage service Dropbox surprised Professional and Business Standard uses with an extra terabyte of storage to use on their accounts today. The change comes free of charge to current users, and prices for new users stay the same as they’ve always been. Users don’t have to take any action in order to take advantage of this extra storage; it will be added to their accounts automatically. It should be noted that this is not an extra terabyte per user on group plans, it’s an extra terabyte to share. This means that Professional plans now 2TB at their disposal, and teams on a Business Standard plan will now have 3TB to share. All other service tiers, across both enterprise and personal products, are not affected.
Before this change, Professional users had 1TB to use, while Business Standard teams shared 2TB. The prices for those two plans, which have not changed, are $20 a month for the Professional plan, and $12.50 per user per month on the Business Standard plan. Since the Business Standard plan requires a minimum of three users, this change effectively works the prices of the two different plan tiers to about $10 per terabyte. On the personal side, the free Basic plan offers 2GB, individuals can pay $10 per month to get 1TB, and the personal version of the Professional plan costs the same as the enterprise version, at $20 per month for 2TB. This means price values are essentially matched for all plans across the board.
This move makes Dropbox quite a bit more attractive for heavy users, with higher storage at the top tiers and a better vaue proposition overall. This puts Dropbox’s pricing nicely in line with its main competitor, Google Drive. The main advantage of Google Drive, besides heavy Google service integration, is a much higher peak capacity; users have the option to pay for up to 10TB of cloud storage with Google Drive, while 2TB is the most an individual Dropbox user can have without resorting to going into enterprise plans, which can be much more expensive and in many cases have a minimum user count requirement to ensure that businesses and groups buy plans rather than individuals. There are other cloud storage apps and services in the space, to be sure, but Dropbox and Google Drive are competing fiercely in the top echelons.