Dropbox Is Ending Unlimited Cloud Storage. Here's Why

Online storage platform Dropbox has announced it is ending unlimited Cloud storage.

Online storage platform Dropbox has announced it is ending unlimited Cloud storage. The company has said some users have been "abusing" its policy of "all the space you need". With this, the San Francisco-headquartered company would gradually begin migrating existing customers to the new policy on November 1. The company announced in a blog post that it would notify all customers at least 30 days prior to their planned migration date.

"We’re moving to a metered storage policy on our Dropbox Advanced plan. There is no action required today from the vast majority of our customers, who will be able to keep their existing storage and more for up to five years at no additional charge. Read on below for additional details," the company wrote in a blog post.

What Is Dropbox Advanced

Dropbox Advanced has been designed for businesses that are upgrading storage as their teams grow. Under this plan, teams had access to as much storage as they needed, along with sophisticated admin, audit, security, and integration capabilities.

"We knew that an “as much space as you need” policy would result in some level of uneven usage because businesses have varying storage needs—and that’s okay. We encourage our customers to use Dropbox for all of their most important work," the company added.

According to Dropbox, it discovered that a growing number of users were buying Dropbox Advanced subscriptions not to run a business or organization, but instead for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, unrelated individuals pooling storage for personal use cases. There were even instances of reselling storage.

"In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of this behaviour in the wake of other services making similar policy changes. We’ve observed that customers like these frequently consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers, which risks creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers. Importantly, our policy for Advanced has always been to provide as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case," the company noted.