Dropbox drops unlimited storage, blames crypto miners and resellers for the change

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Dropbox is ending its unlimited option because some customers were using it for purposes like crypto mining, pooling storage for personal use cases and even reselling storage. The company’s highest-tier “all the space you need” storage plan will now be capped.

With this new change, customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team — enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos or 7,500 hours of HD video, Dropbox says. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage.

“We found a growing number of customers were buying 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, or even instances of reselling storage,” the company wrote in a blog post. “In recent months, we’ve seen a surge of this behavior 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.”

The change comes as Google removed the “as much storage as you need” product branding for its highest-tier Workspace plan in May, as noted by Bloomberg. 

Current customers using less than 35TB of storage per license, which is the case for over 99% of Advanced customers, will be able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using at the time they’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage, for five years at no additional charge to their existing plan.

For the less than 1% of customers utilizing 35TB or more of storage per license, they will be able to continue utilizing their current storage amount at the time you’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for one year (up to 1,000TB total), at no additional charge to their existing plan.

For customers who need additional space, storage add-ons will be available for purchase for new customers on September 18 and existing customers on November 1 at 1TB for $10/month if purchased monthly or $8/month if purchased annually.

Dropbox will start gradually migrating existing customers to the new policy on November 1. The company says it will notify all customers at least 30 days prior to their planned migration date.