Dropbox Ends Unlimited Storage Plans Because of Crypto Miners
Until recently, Dropbox offered an unlimited storage plan called Dropbox Advanced for business users, priced at $24 per month. This plan provided unlimited storage space so that business customers wouldn’t have to worry about storage limits. Unfortunately, Dropbox has decided to discontinue this option because some users were actively abusing the Dropbox Advanced plan.
In a company blog post, Dropbox explained that it is ending unlimited storage because people were purchasing Dropbox Advanced accounts “for purposes such as cryptocurrency and Chia mining, pooling storage for unrelated individuals’ personal use, and even for resale.” Dropbox noted that these users were consuming thousands of times more storage than legitimate business customers.
This kind of misuse has become more common recently, as other services have also started imposing limits. For example, last year, Google removed the “as much storage as you need” wording from its Google Workspace plans.
New Storage Limits for Dropbox Advanced
To avoid spending resources fighting abuse, Dropbox is introducing a 15 TB limit for organizations with three or fewer users. Beyond that, each additional user can add 5 TB, with a maximum storage cap of 1,000 TB per organization.
These changes will take effect immediately for new customers. Existing customers will be gradually moved to the new plans starting November 1 of this year, with at least 30 days’ notice before the transition.
Support for Legitimate Business Customers
To help real business clients adjust, Dropbox announced that customers using less than 35 TB of storage per license can keep their current storage amount and will also receive an extra 5 TB for five years at no additional cost.
Organizations using more than 35 TB will get a similar offer for one year, but will need to contact Dropbox staff to determine pricing. In the standard plan, adding 1 TB of storage without adding more users will cost either $10 per month or $96 per year.