Dropbox, the popular cloud storage company, has announced that it will end its unlimited storage plan for new users. The company said that the change was necessary due to the increasing number of users who were using its storage to mine cryptocurrency, pooling storage for personal use and reselling.
Dropbox said that the crypto miners and resellers were using its unlimited storage to store the large amounts of data. This was putting a strain on the company’s resources and making it difficult for genuine users to get the performance they needed. The company has decided to pull the plug on its “as much space as you need” policy to discourage these kinds of unacceptable practices on the platform.
Under the new plan, customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage.
The existing customers using less than 35TB of storage per license which is over 99% of Advanced customers can continue using 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 less than 1% of customers using 35TB or more of storage per license, they will able to continue using their current storage amount at the time they’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for one year at no additional charge.
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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 begin migrating existing customers to the new policy on November 1 and it will notify all customers at least 30 days prior to their planned migration date.
“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.
Google also made few changes to its storage policy recently. The company in May switched to a pooled storage model for the entry business plan, according to 9to5google report. Under the new plan, the cheapest Google Workspace’s plans now costs $6 per user/month for a year for pooled storage instead of 30GB of storage per user.
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