And if the company hopes to increase that number, it doesn’t want to risk losing free users who may elect to upgrade at a later point - assuming Dropbox can make a paid plan more alluring. That is why Dropbox is treading carefully here - of its 500 million registered users, only around 2.5 percent pay. To the best of our knowledge, none of these companies has a three-device restriction in place. Both Amazon and Microsoft dole out 5GB of storage on their free plans. For just $2 a month, you can get 100GB of storage with Google. Google Drive is free for 15GB, though this storage applies across Google Photos and Gmail. By comparison, Box - which admittedly has always been more of an enterprise product - offers 10GB of storage standard to individual users on a free plan.

The most obvious reason someone may wish to sign up for a paid Dropbox plan is more storage - in the free incarnation, you only get 2GB, while paying $8.25 per month gets you 1,000GB. By comparison, cloud-based note-taking service Evernote has a two-device limit on its free plan, which is just low enough to make people upgrade to a paid plan or, more likely, seek an alternative service with no device limits. In truth, three devices should be enough for most people - that equates to a mobile phone, tablet, and desktop computer.

That Dropbox is now downgrading basic accounts to a three-device limit suggests the company is refocusing its efforts to monetize individuals too.īy reducing its device limit, Dropbox risks losing some users to competitors, though one could argue that losing free users is not a great loss. The San Francisco-based company continues to target businesses with myriad new services and integrations across industries. However, it’s incredibly hard to get consumers to pay for software-as-a-service (SaaS) products, which is why Dropbox doubled down on the enterprise ahead of its arrival on the public market last year. By way of a quick recap, Dropbox in its original guise was more of a consumer-focused cloud storage product. This change only really impacts consumer accounts.

While it’s true that most companies wouldn’t make a big announcement when diminishing one of their plans, it’s worth pointing out that Dropbox doesn’t mention the new linked-device limit in its plan comparison table. Based on our tests, this new limit doesn’t appear to impact browsers - so it seems you can sign into Dropbox on multiple machines through.

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