Dropbox has announced a dramatic price drop for its paid members this week, as the online storage firm looks to compete with the likes of Amazon and Google Drive in the growing market.
Under the new scheme, Dropbox is consolidating three Pro accounts into a single $9.99 per month (or $99.99 per year) plan for 1TB of file storage. Dropbox also released new file sharing and security controls to coincide with the pricing change.
Growing competition
Dropbox’s price drop now matches a similar plan offered by Google Drive, but still costs more than Microsoft’s plans.
A few months ago, Google dropped the price of 1TB storage on Google Drive by 80% to $9.99 per month. For 1TB of data, Microsoft charges $2.50 per user per month on OneDrive or $6.99 per month with an Office 365 subscription.
Dropbox Pro used to cost $9.99 per month for 100GB, $19.99 per month for 200GB and $49.99 per month for 500GB.
Dropbox’s free service will continue to offers 2GB of free space and users can earn up to 16GB of additional space by referring several friends
Meanwhile, the Dropbox for Business plan starts at $15 per user per month for five users. The Business plan includes 5TB for 5 users, unlimited file recovery, centralized billing, phone support and admin controls.
Dropbox has over 300 million users, which is up from 200 million nine months ago. The company has raised $1.1 billion in funding since it launched in 2007. In January, Dropbox’s $250 million round was reportedly based on a large $10 billion valuation.
Additional new Pro features
Pro users will now also get passwords for shared links, adding an extra layer of security for sharing links on Dropbox.
Users can now also set expirations for shared links. The default times are one day and one week, but you can select an exact time. This could be useful for a salesman that wants to share presentations with potential customers for only one day.
In addition, Dropbox has added a new feature that serts view-only permissions for shared folders. Setting shared folders as view-only can prevent someone from deleting or changing files inside of a folder. Files inside of these folders cannot be moved or edited by the recipient. However, recipients can drag a file to their hard drive as a copy.
Finally, a remote wipe security feature lets users delete your Dropbox files from a lost or stolen device by logging in from a different computer.
The lost or stolen device can be unlinked so that it stops syncing with new Dropbox files as well.