It's always been that way. Individual accounts make very little money compared to enterprise accounts. Individual accounts significantly contribute to mindshare, but don't pay the bills.
Dropbox and Box have recently been named as Leaders by Gartner in their magic quadrant (normally reg-walled, but pic in this recent article [1]). Microsoft and Google have been named as Challengers.
Dropbox actually runs a pretty innovative shop [2] on a technical level. For the enterprise, Google and Microsoft offer basic run-of-the-mill storage bundled with their respective office-and-apps suites, while Dropbox and Box have a similar approach of offering APIs to make it possible to create addons or apps that integrate with the datastore or individual documents.
In a way, this enables line-of-business apps to be built that use Dropbox as backend storage and operate on documents stored in Dropbox, which has the capability to challenge a Word or Excel-based workflow.
Since box.com and dropbox are private, that don't disclose that information. However, when they file, they might give some semblance of a breakdown/comparison.
Box is public, but they don't break down "small team" / individual revenue vs enterprise.
They are, however, pushing hard not just for enterprise customers, but for service contracts and "Box Consulting" services. These are where companies like IBM, etc. really make bank.
So this suggests that individual accounts like those Dropbox is more well-known for, are either unprofitable or very low-margin. This may also explain why Dropbox charges more than everyone else.
My organization is ~10 people. We all pay for the Dropbox Pro account individually because it's cheaper per user this way. At what number of people does the Business account tier make sense?
>My organization is ~10 people. We all pay for the Dropbox Pro account individually because it's cheaper per user this way. At what number of people does the Business account tier make sense?
Not sure. The number of people where saying "hey go pay for this yourself" isn't acceptable behavior I suppose?
Then the company is reimbursing an individual license which might not be okay with the license terms. :-/ I can't recall which, but I think that wasn't okay with JetBrains for example.
The pricing seems pretty straightforward - both are priced per user and business is more expensive. It just seems to be a price vs features trade off unless I'm missing something.
Dropbox sells communication and peace of mind, which they believe to be worth $10. The amount of storage synced isn't really the product. Think about it like this: what if, rather than promising 1TB, Dropbox promised to sync "all your files"? Would you find that a more attractive offer?
I think this is more reasonable than you might think.
It might seem like 32GB is a good baseline, but I am using 3.1 GB on my 4 year old smartphone and 16GB is probably plenty for the vast majority of people. But, if your actually recording video etc then 32GB is not that useful.
32GB flash drives are like 8$. So, Apple saves a few dollars on millions of phones and people who think they might actually needs extra storage get a significant amount.
It's always been that way. Individual accounts make very little money compared to enterprise accounts. Individual accounts significantly contribute to mindshare, but don't pay the bills.
Dropbox and Box have recently been named as Leaders by Gartner in their magic quadrant (normally reg-walled, but pic in this recent article [1]). Microsoft and Google have been named as Challengers.
Dropbox actually runs a pretty innovative shop [2] on a technical level. For the enterprise, Google and Microsoft offer basic run-of-the-mill storage bundled with their respective office-and-apps suites, while Dropbox and Box have a similar approach of offering APIs to make it possible to create addons or apps that integrate with the datastore or individual documents.
In a way, this enables line-of-business apps to be built that use Dropbox as backend storage and operate on documents stored in Dropbox, which has the capability to challenge a Word or Excel-based workflow.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/gartner-enterprise-file-stora...
[2] https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/