Is Dropbox’s New 15 Unlimited Plan Truly Unlimited or Are There Hidden Limits?

The allure of unlimited storage plans is great, but the reality is often less glamorous. Storage bandwidth, servers, data centers, and the engineers and support staff needed to operate these services all come at a cost. This article explores the specifics of Dropbox's new 15 Unlimited Plan to uncover the potential hidden limitations.

While Dropbox used Amazon’s S3 as its backend storage a few years ago, S3 is far from free. With a complex pricing model that charges for storage, download bandwidth, server requests, and more, it quickly becomes evident why unlimited plans are so rare.

Unlimited Storage Plans Cannot Be Trusted

Simply put, unlimited storage plans cannot be trusted because they come with hidden costs. Servers, data centers, and the personnel to manage them all require significant financial investment. Even a few years ago, Dropbox used Amazon's S3 for its storage needs, and despite S3 being more affordable than one might think, it still has a complicated pricing model.

Dropbox Business Account Storage Limits

When considering Dropbox's business account, it's important to note that unlimited storage is not always the case. The company’s support page clearly states that you need to request additional storage when you approach your storage limit. Here’s how it works:

Personal and business accounts have storage limits. Dropbox Business offers additional storage based on your needs. To get more storage, team admins can contact Dropbox support through the admin console. As a member of a team, you should ask your team admin to contact Dropbox support on your behalf.

Explicitly asking for more storage does not guarantee a positive response. Dropbox may work with you to accommodate your needs, but there’s no guarantee that they will always honor these requests.

Technical and Business Limits

Even if Dropbox were to approve every request for additional storage, there are still technical and business limits:

Technical Limitations

Dropbox's application performance can degrade if you have more than 300,000 files. This is a soft limit, and a hard rule recommends avoiding more than 1 million files on any single computer. The performance of folder sync degrades as the number of files increases.

Performance Issues

In a business setting, if most of your files are Microsoft Office documents or PDFs and their average size is less than 500KB, the total space for a million files would be approximately 500 GB. This technical limit is both a business and a technical constraint, designed to prevent you from uploading an unlimited amount of data.

Alternative Solutions

For businesses that need to manage a large number of files and experience degraded performance with Dropbox, there are alternative solutions:

Cloud File Server Solutions

Instead of using a file sync-and-share service that limits the number of files, consider a Cloud File Server solution. This approach involves using a web-based file server solution to map cloud storage as a network drive, similar to a local file server. Many cloud storage services use a folder sync-based solution, but DriveHQ has offered enterprise-class Cloud File Server and WebDAV Drive Mapping services for over a decade.

Conclusion

While Dropbox's new 15 Unlimited Plan sounds tempting, it's crucial to understand that unlimited storage plans come with hidden limitations. Dropbox’s technical and business limits, as well as the need to request additional storage, should be considered. For businesses with large file volumes, a Cloud File Server solution might be the better choice to ensure optimal performance and manageability.

Keywords: Dropbox, Unlimited Storage Plan, Hidden Limitations