Dropbox is ending the unlimited option as some customers are using it for purposes like cryptocurrency mining, aggregate storage for personal use cases, and even reselling storage. . The company’s top-tier, “all the space you need” hosting plan will now be limited.
With this new change, customers who purchase the Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of group shared storage, enough space to store approximately 100 million documents, 4 million photos, or 7,500 hours HD video, Dropbox said. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage.
“We are seeing an increasing number of customers purchasing an Advanced subscription not to run a business or organization but for purposes such as cryptocurrency mining and Chia, independent individuals gathering together,” the company wrote. memory for personal use cases or even memory resale cases”. . in a blog post. “In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of this behavior in the wake of other services making similar policy changes. 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.”
The change comes as Google removed the “as much storage as you need” product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, as noted by Bloomberg.
Current customers using less than 35TB of storage per license, which is the case for over 99% of Advanced customers, will be able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using at the time they’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage, for five years at no additional charge to their existing plan.
For the less than 1% of customers utilizing 35TB or more of storage per license, they will be able to continue utilizing their current storage amount at the time you’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for one year (up to 1,000TB total), at no additional charge to their existing plan.
For customers who need additional space, storage add-ons will be available for purchase for new customers on September 18 and existing customers on November 1 at 1TB for $10/month if purchased monthly or $8/month if purchased annually. Dropbox will gradually begin migrating existing customers to the new policy on November 1, the company said it will notify all customers at least 30 days before the expected migration date.