Dropbox (YC S08) Now Effortlessly Syncing Files For 1 Million Members

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/24/dropbox-now-effortlessly-syncing-files-for-1-million-members/

by immad • 17 years ago

89 33 17 years ago

techcrunch.com

judegomila• 17 years ago

Such a great product, such a great team!

ashot• 17 years ago

compare to the half dozen failed attempts by microsoft and other big co's to solve this problem

old-gregg• 17 years ago

Yeah, Linus rocks.

furburger• 17 years ago

i wonder if amazon will stay on the "wholesale" side of this equation or eventually move into the retail side...seems gdrive or whatever it is google is planning might upset the amazon/N-front-ends racket

ja272• 17 years ago

I like dropbox a lot, but have two problems.

The major one is that their price point just seems too high. $99 a year just isn't a price that I'm willing to pay without seriously considering the value I'm getting. (Then when I consider the value, $99 can buy a pretty big portable hard drive or flash drive. So I buy the drives and just use the free 2 gig Dropbox for synchronizing smaller files.)

On the other hand, I had no problem paying $30/year for Flickr Pro. That's an easy price point, even for a cheap bastard like me.

The minor one is that they don't seem to own dropbox.com. I don't know how that didn't get done before settling on the name, but they gotta get that cleared up.

catch23• 17 years ago

> The minor one is that they don't seem to own dropbox.com. I don't know how that didn't get done before settling on the name, but they gotta get that cleared up.

Would you prefer them to use a name like droppboxx or drropbox instead? Most likely some domain squatter sat on dropbox.com and demanded 3 million for the name. They could have picked a completely different name, but dropbox is nice and simple, and the correct site comes up on google which is what most people use anyway.

netsp• 17 years ago

Seems like a bit of an issue costing money & efforts. They are running ads "Dropbox (Official Site)" on both Google Search (maybe no longer necessary) & the sponsored listing on the actual site.

rms• 17 years ago

They'll buy it eventually, facebook used to be called thefacebook (which almost seems ridiculous now).

antidaily2• 17 years ago

http://web.archive.org/web/20040212031928/http://www.theface...

axod• 17 years ago

Question is, how much will it cost. In terms of money, and hassle.

Personally I would have just chosen a name that isn't already taken.

albertni3• 17 years ago

Let's not forget our old friend "getfirefox.com" =)

antidaily2• 17 years ago

I do the same - I have a 500gb little dell drive that I use with Time Machine. And I use Dropbox for day-to-day project files.

frossie3• 17 years ago

Yeah, it's not the $99 that is the problem, it is that it buys you 50GB. The most valuable digital data I have is baby/kid photos, video etc. They are truly irreplaceable (to me, anyway), and I wouldn't mind some convenient way to do off-site backup rather than lugging rsynced disks around, but 50GB is not enough to back it up.

As for syncing and sharing project files, that is what the git repository is for.

But quite obviously there is a market for what they sell. I'm just not in that market. Not until I can get half a TB for my $99, anyway.

mkuhn• 17 years ago

For me a 10 gig account for less money, e.g. $39, would be perfect, I only sync documents but am reaching my limit now, and $99 is somewhat a lot especially because I don't need the offered 50 GB...

For people with the need for more storage there is a 100 GB plan I think...

ja272• 17 years ago

I have the same problem. I have almost 100 gigs of photos which are the majority of my backup needs.

Flickr's been an somewhat easy way to back them up and share them at the same time. But I have growing frustration with Flickr because I'm really using it for three different purposes now: backing up all my photos, sharing family snapshots with friends and family, and sharing more artsy photography with mostly strangers (which is really Flickr's sweet spot).

Using Flickr for backup is incredibly annoying and iffy because their uploaders are so fragile and downloading the entire collection depends on third-party software that Flickr could break or disable at any moment.

I'd love to move my photo backups off of Flickr and am close to using just some rotating USB hard drives, but I'd much rather have something automated. Dropbox could definitely have my business there and be price competitive if they offered say 250 gigs for under $100 a year. Backing up my photos should be a good profit for them over time, because once I get past the initial backup, I really only upload a gig or two a month and rarely download. Unlike my other documents, I don't need my photo backup replicated between my different computers running Dropbox.

Sharing photos with friends and family is something that Dropbox could be good at or at least acceptable. The Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook uploaders all suck compared to the ease of Dropbox. If they added some better privacy settings, RSS feeds, and some more viewing/downloading options, they could be player in the photo sharing space.

ableal2• 17 years ago

Paging Colin Percival (http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cperciva ) and tarsnap ( http://www.daemonology.net/blog/ ) to the white courtesy phone.

(Guy's too polite to come toot his own horn here.) Might fit your use case, if you're willing to trade shine for price-efficiency.

Angostura• 17 years ago

What about Mozy?

scorpion0322• 17 years ago

Even now, basecamp uses basecamphq for the url.

With google toolbar installed, all it takes is to enter - drop box - on the address bar, anyway!

daveambrose• 17 years ago

Great for them. As was said in prior threads and this one, it's a fantastic product that I use on a daily basis.

I even noticed the subtle changes on the web interface some days ago. Nice stuff and looking forward to the P2P system ahead.

eru• 17 years ago

Apropos P2P: Ever heard of Wuala?

huhtenberg• 17 years ago

I know that Dropbox is a darling of HN, but I just can't help but point out the following.

As someone how developed and grew (somewhat) similar service to 3 million users, I am guessing there's a lot of abandoned and idle accounts in this million. Anywhere between 75% and 95%.

But even if they are actively synch'ing files for just 100K users instead of a million, it is still a pretty big achievement. Also the growth of the active users tends to follow the curve of the cumulative number, so the exponent nature of it is quite impressive as well. It would help to keep the title of the PR bit factual though, especially when it's geared towards the technical community. As they are not synch'ing files for 1 million users.

albertni3• 17 years ago

You're right that accounts are abandoned or go idle. It's substantially less than 75% though =)

Also, well over 100K users actively sync a file each and every day.

edd• 17 years ago

Would you mind letting us in on a rough number of accounts that have been obviously abandoned?

scorpion0322• 17 years ago

So, if you define 'active user' as the user who did a file sync today, 10% of your users are active users?

BenJones• 17 years ago

Absolutely inspiring. It is going to keep me up tonight. Crazy easy to use.

jasongullickson• 17 years ago

I've used allot of similar things, and I can say that Dropbox has been the one I've stuck with the longest.

I've even managed to loose data using USB drives (mistakenly wiped the wrong one, or lost it) but I haven't pulled an "unrecoverable boner" yet with DB.

Working with the same code across multiple OS platforms (rails code mostly) it's been a lifesaver always having the latest copy (even offline).

I'm considering a paid account (reaching my limit) but like the others have said, it's just beyond the "impulse buy" price-point for me these days...

hpvic03• 17 years ago

I use Dropbox at my business school for every group project. I've probably signed up at least 20 other people.

Knowing that you'll never have to email another attachment is an incredible feeling.

Dropbox (YC S08) Now Effortlessly Syncing Files For 1 Million Members

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