Dropbox Adds Features to Pro Plan; Offers 1TB Storage at $9.99 Per Month

Dropbox is adding new features that will be available only to its Pro customers, while simultaneously reducing the way customers chose paid plans, by reducing the number of Pro plans from three to just one.

The single Dropbox Pro plan at $9.99 (approximately Rs. 600) per month will offer individual users twice the storage that was available with earlier plans at one-fifth the price. Dropbox previously offered 100GB storage at $9.99 per month, 200GB at $19.99 (approximately Rs. 1,200) a month and 500GB at $49.99 (approximately Rs. 3,000) a month, while the new Pro plan will offer 1TB storage. Customers can chose to pay $99 (approximately Rs. 6000) per year for the new Pro plan and save another 17 percent compared to monthly billing. Dropbox offers 2GB of cloud storage for free, though customers can get more free space via referrals and other promotions.

Dropbox's move finally puts the company at par with Google, which announced price cuts of its own earlier this year. Google offers 15GB storage for free, 100GB at $1.99 (approximately Rs. 120) per month, 1TB at $9.99 per month, and 10TB or more starting at $99.99 per month. More recently, Microsoft had made a similar move.

While the announcement will be welcomed by those who use Dropbox as a backup service, unless the way Dropbox fundamentally alters the way it works on desktops, the increased storage space is unlikely to be of any help to people who use machines that come with limited storage space like entry-level MacBook Air models.

User JP explains this point pretty well on the Dropbox blog post announcing the changes:

While I don't use THAT much space, that's the one issue with cloud storage. It would be GREAT if it looked like everything is saved on the computer but actually download on demand.

You'd have 1TB of stuff on Dropbox and the "files" on the computer act as download links. It would be a 1kb file that, when opened, triggers dropbox to download it. This way, if I have a movie in my Dropbox folder, it would show as being there, but not actually be fully saved on my computer.

This feature would distinguish between folders, whereby a folder consisting of word documents and excel documents (for example) I would choose to be downloaded in their entirety so I can always search through them using Spotlight. However, a "Movies" folder would show the file names as a 1kb file that, when double-clicked, will download the entire file locally.

With MacBooks coming with 128gb of SSD as default, it isn't like 1TB of syncing is practical without a feature as awesome as this would be.

As we mentioned earlier, increased storage space is not the only new feature in Dropbox Pro. Customers can now set passwords for shared links to create an additional layer of security so only people with the password can access your link. You can also have shared links expire after a set time; and set view-only permissions for certain users of shared folders so they cannot edit any data.

Dropbox is also launching a remote wipe feature lets you delete your Dropbox files from a lost or stolen device while keeping them backed up in Dropbox.