Dropbox Advanced Plan Limited Because of Abusive Users

This article, published on August 24, 2023, was written by By Dropbox Team.

Updates to our storage policy on Dropbox Advanced

We’re moving to a metered storage policy on our Dropbox Advanced plan. There is no action required today from the vast majority of our customers, who will be able to keep their existing storage and more for up to 5 years at no additional charge.

We designed Advanced for businesses, so they don’t have to worry about scaling storage as their teams grow. Under this plan, teams had access to as much storage as they needed, along with sophisticated admin, audit, security, and integration capabilities. We knew that an “as much space as you need” policy would result in some level of uneven usage because businesses have varying storage needs-and that’s okay. We encourage our customers to use Dropbox for all of their most important work.

But over time, we found a growing number of customers were 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. 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. Importantly, our policy for Advanced 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.

While we prohibit abusive behavior, maintaining long lists of “acceptable” and “unacceptable” use cases for Advanced would not be a sustainable solution, and these kinds of policies would be difficult to enforce at scale. As a result, we’re sunsetting the “as much space as you need” policy and transitioning to a metered model. That said: we’re committed to making this transition as seamless as possible for our customers.

Starting today, customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with 3 active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team-enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos or 7,500 hours of HD video. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage.

We’re committed to providing all customers around the world with a best-in-class experience, and offering support to help them transition to this new plan.

We recognize that changing an “all the space you need” policy will be disappointing for some customers. And while we’re unable to offer this option going forward, our goal is to ensure that the vast majority of teams on our Advanced plan experience no disruption.

Customers using less than 35TB of storage per license – 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 5 years at no additional charge to their existing plan.

For the less than 1% of customers utilizing 35TB or more of storage per license, we’re committed to working with you. To make this transition easier, you’ll be able to continue utilizing your 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 your existing plan. You’ll be contacted by our team in the coming weeks to discuss a range of options for getting the storage that you need for your business or organization.

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.

We will begin gradually migrating existing customers to the new policy on November 1. You don’t need to do anything today. We’ll notify all customers at least 30 days prior to their planned migration date.

For more information on the Dropbox Advanced plan, please visit our Help Center.

* An active user is a person who regularly logs in and uses their Dropbox account.
* Each additional active license must be for a new team member and cannot be used solely for additional team storage. Storage add-ons must be purchased for additional space needed beyond what’s offered in the Dropbox Advanced plan.
*The new Dropbox Advanced plan has a total cap of 1,000TB. This includes storage add-on purchases.