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| Why I'm Dropping Dropbox | 2019-11-20 17:22:43-0400 | I'm finally canceling my Dropbox Pro account and moving to iCloud Drive for synchronized cloud storage. |
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I've been a loyal Dropbox user since its inception as a Y Combinator startup ten years ago. Having a folder on all of my devices that instantly synchronized with each other was a game-changer for me, and I grew dependent on it more and more as they gave out free storage like candy — 48 GB for having a Samsung Chromebook, 1 GB for "Posting <3 to Twitter," and so on — until I needed to upgrade to Dropbox Pro. But this month I canceled my Pro subscription after a few too many strikes.
Deleting 401,907 files from Dropbox... 😬
Five strikes, you're out...
Decisions made by the top folks at Dropbox gave me an increasingly sour taste in my mouth over the past few years. The biggest red flags were:
- Removing my long-standing 48 GB promotion for Samsung Chromebooks from 2014 with little notice, offering a free 3 GB instead and preventing me from adding new files until I forked over $11.99/month for Dropbox Pro.
- Adding a 3-device limit for free accounts, triggering another hostage negotiation resulting in me upgrading to Pro.
- Continuously forcing bloated updates to their once-simple macOS app down users' throats, to the point where "the new Dropbox" was consistently eating up over a gigabyte of RAM and a non-negligible chunk of CPU usage thanks to an entire web browser being embedded into it:
- Explicitly dropping support for symlinking (aka making aliases to) files outside of the literal
~/Dropboxfolder, which was incredibly helpful for nerds — once their main audience and biggest cheerleaders — with things like dotfiles and Git repositories. - ...and as a bonus, making the process of canceling Dropbox Pro incredibly convoluted, annoying, and sketchy. Here's a video demonstration via Justin Dunham: