Dropbox ends unlimited cloud storage plan due to crypto miners and resellers

Dropbox has just announced that it will be discontinuing its offer of unlimited cloud storage with the reason being that certain customers were using a large number of resources that would in turn degrade its cloud service for other clients

Dropbox stated in a blog post that a growing number of Advanced subscriptions were not being used to run business but rather for purposes such as crypto and Chia mining, reselling storage, or pooling storage for personal use.

They say that customers like these “consume thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers” and that it creates an unreliable experience for all their customers.

They also considered maintaining long lists of acceptable and unacceptable use cases but came to the conclusion that it would be difficult to enforce at such a large scale.

As a result, they are now shutting down their “as much space as you need” policy and will now be moving to a metered model.

In its blog post 13, it stated that customers who purchase their Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will get 15TB of storage shared by the team with each active license receiving an additional 5TB of storage.

They also said that customers that use less than 35TB of storage per license, which accounts for 99% of their customer base, will be able to keep the total amount of storage their team is using plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for five years and at no extra cost.

For the 1% that do use over 35TB of storage, Dropbox has said that they will be able to continue using the current storage amount plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for up to one year. Moreover, they will be contacted by their team to discuss a range of options for storage.

Dropbox’s Advanced plan is its highest-tier plan outside its Enterprise plans that currently costs USD 30PHP 1,761INR 2,542EUR 29CNY 218 per month with its new policy going into effect on November 1 for existing users with them being notified at least 30 days prior to its effect.

Dropbox also said for those that need additional storage, add-ons will be available for purchase for new customers on September 18 and existing customers on November 1 at 1TB for 10 USD per month if purchased monthly or 8 USD per month if purchased annually.

This change in Dropbox also comes after Google removed its unlimited storage on Drive in May according to Bloomberg.