Dropbox has limited its Advanced Plan’s Storage due to crypto mining

Dropbox broke the news to the world in a recent blog post about dropping its previously popular premium offer of unlimited storage due to increased crypto mining and reselling taking place through the platform. Due to the deliberate misuse of its platform, Dropbox announced the implementation of a metered model in its advanced plan. 

The company claims the change was necessary. The company found it hard to provide the needed performance to genuine customers because of the huge strain left on resources by illegitimate users, who use the unlimited storage space to store huge amounts of data for crypto mining and reselling.

The new advanced plan provides 15 TB of storage across the whole team after customers sign up for the platform with three active licenses. The businesses that are already connected to the platform and have used less than 35 TB of storage space will get to keep the amount and will, in addition, receive 5 TB of extra space for five years at no additional cost from the time they are notified.  

This special offer will only be available to existing customers. The new incoming customers, meanwhile, will experience an advanced plan implemented by Dropbox. Beyond this, the companies will have to pay for any additional active licenses for an extra 5 TB of storage space. 

For customers who need more storage space, storage add-ons will be available to new customers starting September 18, 2023, and to existing customers starting November 1, 2023. Customers can buy 1TB of storage for $10/month if purchased monthly and $8/month if purchased annually. 

The company states that the migration of old customers to a new plan will begin on November 1, 2023, with companies notified 30 days prior. Dropbox further clarifies that it is committed to working with companies using approximately 35TB of space. And will likely contact these companies to discuss a wider range of alternate storage options for them. 

“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,” writes Dropbox in its blog post. 

As per Dropbox, consumers misusing the unlimited space to fulfill selfish agendas use 1000 times more storage than businesses using the platform for legitimate purposes. In these cases, implementing use policies and their enforcement in practice just won’t help improve the situation.  

With the increased mining of crypto, the Dropbox change is implemented in other services as well, like Google, which introduced a similar cap on its storage. According to Bloomberg, the company removed the “as much storage as you need” perk from its Workspace Enterprise plan in May. Google offers its cheapest workspace plan for $6/per person per month for a year for pooled storage instead of 30GB of storage.

The company later stopped offering unlimited storage space in Google Photos in 2021. And also tried implementing limited file creation for Drive users.