The news that Dropbox is to open a UK office in London is welcome for there is nothing like a bit of local attention and support. But the first task for the team, I suggest, is tackling the service’s overpriced data packages. I stump up $199 for 210GB Dropbox storage (including the 10GB of freebie space I’ve accumulated by recommending the service to friends and colleagues) and that is more than I could be paying to competing services.
I made the above comment in my story on Dropbox’s unacceptably high pricing little more than a month ago on July 23. I tweeted the article to @Dropbox but got not a chirp in reply. Now we know why: The company was already planning a major price reduction which it announced today.
Not only is the price lower, the top tier of storage has been increased from 500GB (which used to cost $500 a year) to 1TB, all for just under $120 a year. This is a serious bit of aggressive marketing and will go a long way in retaining existing customers and in expanding the number of users.
In my opinion Dropbox has always been the best of the cloud synchronisation services. I’ve been using it for over five years and never once has it let me down. In fact, on several occasions it has saved my bacon, allowing me to recover otherwise lost previous versions of vital databases. Now, in addition to reliability, Dropbox is good value for money.
I just checked my Dropbox account and see that I am now on the new Dropbox Pro service with 1TB of storage. Since I paid for a full year in advance at $199, I am expecting an extension of the period to take into account the new pricing.