The way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch.
Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago!
Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the potential. I think it's because the Dropbox founders were so consumer-focused that they couldn't envision how huge Paper could be in the productivity tools space. They kept framing it as an Evernote competitor, instead of seeing it turning into something like Notion.
Even when they finally seemed to understand that Dropbox was never going to be a B2C sensation, they kept acquiring "side product" businesses instead of ones that built on Dropbox's existing value. (To their credit, this was the zeitgeist back when they started — B2B was not cool at all, and the sort of B2C/B hybrid that exists now wasn't a thing.)
Meanwhile startups like Notion actually saw the opportunity and blossomed. And nowadays, even super-slow Google is releasing features like pageless mode, markdown support, etc. Such that Paper is almost irrelevant at this point, despite having had such a massive head start.
It's sad because I can easily imagine an alternate future where Dropbox understood what Paper could be, and invested in it alongside things like an Airtable competitor, to create a truly viable, and forward-looking alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Drive, without all the baggage of being a Microsoft Office clone.
"Thanks for subscribing to Dropbox Pro ianstormtaylor! Would you like to upgrade to Dropbox for Enterprise?"
"Thanks for sharing a file, ianstormtaylor, Dropbox for Business will do some bullshit"
Dropbox was a great product, but a shit company. They have a software platform and core technology that for B2B would readily displace high dollar stuff like managed file transfer and had a good early API that many apps took advantage of. I had a great experience working with them to capture shadow IT use of the product and get it in a managed environment.
But the relentless nagging, even of paying customers, is unserious and stupid. I wouldn't touch the product with a 10 foot pole.
Dropbox saw that the only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box, and they did not like it. Also, we kept criticizing Dropbox for moving away from a "folder that syncs".
I agree with a folder that syncs. Today I use dropbox, but I do my best to avoid interacting with it, because just clicking on the menubar icon makes me upset that no feature there is what I actually need. No sensible ignore rules, etc.
But I could have been wrong and focusing on dropbox was not the only path. But even if it wasn't, they fumbled every promising product they could. I mean, Mailbox, they pioneered (read acquired) the email swipe UX, then killed it.
Then there was that launch where they hyped some iCloud sync service that would allow apps to store settings and game states, etc. Whatever happened to that?
Today I'm so afraid that dropbox's more daring products will die faster than Google can retire theirs, that I simply do not use it for anything other than a folder than syncs where I can share links. And now that I think about it, it's been a while since I had to share a single link, so maybe I can just move to synching.
> only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box
What does this mean? I used Box once in about 2011 at work (before Google and MS got serious with their "Drive" features my company had paid for Box) and my impression was actually "this is like if Dropbox were built by Oracle" -- worse than Dropbox in every way, both usability and performance, but with some corporate-tailored features. As a consumer, I would never have dreamed of switching to Box.
So that's why I'm curious what you mean by the comment with respect to B2C.
I mean exactly what you experienced. They did not go the enterprise way bc they did not want to become Box. They didn't think they could provide a good UX if they focused on enterprise.
They're not even a "folder that syncs" anymore, at least on android if you make a folder "available offline" (which should be the default to begin with) it stores it internally to the dropbox app where it can't be accessed by other apps. There is another button "Save to device", but that's just a one-time snapshot of the file that won't stay in sync. I deleted my account after they pulled that enshitification.
Yeah, Dropbox Paper remains the best pure writing experience I've ever used at work. I think Notion has a lot of nice features, but just writing in it still feels more cumbersome than Paper did a decade ago.
I completely agree. Paper was so frictionless that you could actually use it as a tool to think and sketch ideas with. Instead of Notion which feels clunky just to type in.
Stripe used to live and dir internally off of hackpad with some custom search engine attached to it. It was all binned after the Atlassianfication, but I don't think many devs saw the move away as positive.
In my experience Dropbox is actually really good at syncing data between devices.
It’s fast. It’s way more reliable than iCloud, and for “simply” keeping folders in sync just “simply” the best - for simple user requirements simplicity and reliability are key.
Did I stress ‘simple’ enough? Maybe I should stress it Latin? Simplex veri sigillum.
Side note: Why do people like Notion? I just can't get into it. It feels like every time I type, some autocomplete thing pops up and stops my typing. I just went back to the good old Notes app.
As someone who switched from Dropbox Paper to Notion...
There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding what it's for.
For starters, it's way easier to organize stuff in Notion than Paper. This is less a feature of Notion, and more of a terrible limitation of Paper. Paper was stuck with the "files within folders" model. Just the fact that Notion lets you control what shows up in the navigation sidebar was a huge time saver for me. And being able to create pages within pages within pages (which is very different from having sibling documents inside a folder) made it much more flexible for organizing everything.
But the real power of Notion is when you start to treat it as a database builder rather than a note-taking tool. Yes, it's useful for taking notes, but those notes are about something, and with tools like Paper, Obsidian, etc., the thing is always living somewhere else.
With Notion, I was able to make a database of projects and another database of tasks which linked to those projects. Each developer on my team has a custom dashboard showing just the tasks that are assigned to them and currently in-progress. I have a totally different view showing all the projects going on right now. And then each of those tasks have a pretty good (I admit it's not great) note-taking feature. The notes are living within the actual object you're taking notes about, which is totally different from Paper.
I even use Notion for personal stuff. I have a Notion form that my wife and I use to enter things we need to buy next time we're at the store. And there's a view showing the things we need to buy from each separate store with checkboxes next to each one so it's easy to remove them when we're done. There's a separate database listing the movies we want to watch, with a view for all the ones we previously watched, and when. I have a database of cocktail recipes along with ingredient lists (so I can easily filter by ingredient), formulas to calculate different volumes based on how many drinks you're making, a rating system, etc.
Basically, if you look at Notion as a bucket of unstructured notes with a markdown editor, I agree, it's nothing special. But that's not what it really is.
I have tried several times - real genuine multi-week efforts - but I'm with you. It never worked for me. I can see potential in there but it's just too much, for too little in return.
It's possible to lock pages in Notion (from the ... menu on the page), which prevents editing without unlocking. Most org-level pages in our workspace are locked. People also typically lock project pages after they ship, for example.
I'm with you. I've been working on making Obsidian great for work with real-time collaboration, SSO, and the ability to have fully private document collaboration [0].
Performance aside, it's crazy that in the age of Claude Code people don't insist on having their docs local, private, and in markdown.
Here is the thing: Dropbox has no business being anything other than a cloud storage solution. Stop trying to do everything, it's too difficult and too expensive. Find what you're great at, and just improve it little by little. Stop adding shit.
Never, ever used any additional Dropbox services. All I need it to do is be a reliable cloud storage. Nothing else.
Lower the price below Google Drive and be better at being Google Drive than Google is. It wouldn't be that hard. You wouldn't need to be more expensive if you weren't pissing money away on acquisitions no one wants all the time.
ah yes, make your product cheaper than the same thing from company that has the greatest number of free software offerings with the largest user bases in the world
The changelog states: "Added support for “differential” uploads. When large files are edited, Drive for desktop will now upload only the parts of the file that changed."
Okay, but let's say Google implements that. Than Dropbox is toast, right?
It's such a shame, because I absolutely believe that simpler products which focus on one thing and do it well are basically always a better user experience (and I personally try to use them wherever possible). But I think the business case is hard.
You have no business telling anyone what their business is. Dropbox has "business" doing whatever they want to try to make great products, achieve their mission and turn over some cash.
> Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then
Except that you had to have everyone use a Dropbox account. So if you are already in bed with Google as a company, adding Dropbox for everyone might not be such a fun idea.
So far this year they've discontinued Paper (app), Passwords, Send and Track, Vault and Capture. Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones!
Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.
On the other hand, they are adding tons of invisible yet useful features like auto OCR on PDFs, auto-transcription of audio files, a much better search, etc.
It's not suitable to store anything that sensitive, but for regular stuff, they are becoming a powerhouse, and the web app allows you to work very efficiently and fast.
I personally like Dropbox, and don't find the direction they're heading ill-advised.
The direction is great. The communication and customer support leave a lot to be desired.
The thing is, its hard to have a product thats important to you and does cool things but also you don't rely on for anything crucial. Esp when its file storage.
> you don't rely on for anything crucial. Esp when its file storage.
Crucial and sensitive are different things. I trust them with the files I actively and regularly use, but I don't trust them with anything that needs encryption, which is a tiny sliver of what I have in terms of files.
Keeping things backed up is an entirely different conversation, though.
I stopped using Dropbox when they started limiting free accounts to three devices and I suddenly got a lot of confused and irritated messages from all the people I'd evangelized into using Dropbox.
I wrote off paper when they announced (later 2019) that everyone would be migrated to the new storage in a few months and then kept pushing the date out over the next four years.
It seemed that they were not allocating any resources to the project.
I did check back every year or so for entertainment purposes. Mine was migrated in November of 2024.
To my best understanding, my old paper documents were just deleted. I can still log into the old paper.Dropbox.com but see an empty list. I assume this means my account was never migrated.
Around November 2024, mine were all moved to a folder tree "Migrated Paper Docs" in my dropbox in a folder tree, as .paper files. The web UI says the folder has 84 decedents. My backup, done through the API years ago has 118, but there may be some deleted ones in there.
If I go to paper.dropbox.com, I only see six under "starred" in the left hand side (after unfolding the tree) and two in the main area. After opening another starred one, which links into dropbox, the main area now shows three.
So the migration to dropbox did mostly work for me, but whatever was left at paper.dropbox.com is messed up.
> Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones!
Oh that's great! I currently use OneDrive because of Personal Vault (and other smaller reasons), because no one else offered something like it. I didn't even know about Vault, but I guess that's for the better because I wouldn't want the folder holding my ID etc. becoming accessible to every single app connected to my Dropbox.
There had to have been a better way to discontinue it. Even making the folder require migration on next access would've been better than silently worsening it.
Years ago, their desktop client was the only one among popular similar services that supported proper delta sync while also covering all major platforms. Absolutely indispensable if you used it with things like TrueCrypt containers, where changing one byte within would cause most sync clients to resend the whole 50 GB, or however large it was. Dropbox handled this fine and would finish in a couple of seconds (actually sending new data, not just pretending it did that).
I don't know how it is these days, wouldn't be surprised if other commercial services still haven't figured it out.
Google Drive added delta sync this year, while OneDrive added it in 2020 apparently.
I also overstayed with Dropbox for that reason, and now I don't see a real reason for their higher $/GB. Though their client is more stable than Google Drive from my experience (which randomly stops working on Windows often enough), OneDrive has been rock solid for me on both Windows and macOS.
I do this with a WebDAV server (Fastmail Files) by breaking up my encrypted volume into 10MiB chunks, so that the sync has the granularity of that, plus a FUSE script to present the directory containing the chunks as a single block device for mounting. Obviously not cross-platform though.
The only cloud storage that has a decent Linux client is Dropbox.
Koofr is a decent cloud solution. Their client is horrendous across all platforms and lacks the most basic functionalities.
You can argue OneDrive / GoogleDrive are semi decent if you also use insync, which adds another license to purchase when a basic client should come free with the service you've already bought.
And no, rsync doesn't come even close to it in terms of functionality/simplicity, no matter how much hardened Linux users who haven't been outside since 1988 are trying to convince everyone otherwise.
Because they provide nice features on top of basic file storage. If you use them, they justify the cost. If you don't need them, there's always pCloud.
Right, and that's what Dropbox Paper was probably originally an attempt at working toward, from the opposite direction — "We have Google Drive, now we just need Google Docs."
It should be obvious that "a whole collaborative office suite" is not the kind of thing a regular company can build as an extension play... but somehow some manager inside Dropbox convinced them that direction was possible. At least for a while. Seems they've gradually come to their senses.
For various reasons, I have all three of them. There are some missing things in Google and Microsoft's offerings. Namely:
1. App integration (3rd parties can access to a single folder in your Dropbox, allowing "purchase to Dropbox" directly. Many merchants automatically update the files if they receive updates, too.
2. Auto OCR, incl. handwriting. My old comics which are not English are OCRd, and I can do full-text search inside them, which is very useful for me.
3. Fast, auto transcription in many languages. I needed a transcription of a file recently. All services needed memberships, etc. I did it from Google cloud API toolbox. However when I uploaded the the same file to Dropbox, I saw a transcription button. It produced equally good results in way less time.
4. Send-a-copy (aka Transfer). I don't want to share and try to remember to disable links. My Dropbox membership contains a complete "WeTransfer" replacement, and I use it a lot.
5. Request files. I open a link, people send in the files I need, then the "dropbox" closes automatically. I get notifications for uploads, too.
6. Funnily, a working Linux client.
...and possibly more I don't use or can't remember right now.
I am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used.
I would love for them to implement:
- The ability to exclude folders from syncing - useful for .venv etc
- The ability to sync folders outside of the dropbox folder
- Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html
If you mean differential sync (or "delta sync"), Google Drive added it this year and OneDrive added it a few years ago. Google Drive's client is much worse than Dropbox's, though, with it just randomly breaking on Windows often. I've had good experiences with OneDrive on Windows & macOS, though.
I’ve been loving Maestral so far, it’s just the syncing, none of the other stuff. It has some downsides (it can’t upload symlinks but it can download them, and it doesn’t have LAN sync) but it’s super lightweight.
Good. That app was horrible. I'd get a notification of a comment and 90% of the time it wouldn't load the comment, so I'd have to scroll to the bottom where the comments were and I couldn't tell what the comment related to so I'd reload the link and hope for the it to properly highlight the text and show the comment and that would work maybe 40% of the time. Editing text was frustrating as well.
If they provide a better web experience I'm all for this.
What Dropbox has been doing to Paper has been so sad to me. I've been a daily user for almost a decade (and Hackpad before that), and their recent move into combining it into Dropbox itself has caused me to almost completely stop.
I get what they're doing... unifying everything into one system. I get it. But I can't find any of my docs anymore. When I go to paper.dropbox.com, where there use to be thousands of docs, there's now nothing.
The app wasn't great, but it was better than nothing.
after they combined paper I got a new folder called Paper docs in my account which had all of my paper docs I'd normally see on paper.dropbox.com. Did you not get that folder?
I have it but most of my docs aren’t in it. They can only be accessed via direct link. The folder is also not accessible from paper.dropbox.com on mobile, which is more important now that the app is gone.
I wrote to support and they told me there’s nothing they can do.
(And even if the docs were in it… now I’m a few clicks away from my docs which is way worse than before.)
I'm continually impressed that Dropbox continues to exist, so long after their primary product offering was so thoroughly sherlocked by the big two B2C companies (Google and Apple) and the big two B2B companies (MS and Google). Especially because I've never worked anywhere that used Dropbox, so they don't have the long-tail life support legacy B2B money keeping them afloat like say, Lotus Notes did.
B2C was lost to them the minute Google Drive and iCloud Drive both got decent enough. Clearly with all their random acquisitions and stuff they were trying to become a #3 to MS and Google for corporate, but it's such a moat to penetrate, since they'd have to become at least a little better than at least one of them at most of the big productivity things (email, calendar, documents & drive, chat, meetings), or be a lot better at one specific thing, enough that businesses will have an appetite to keep paying for GOOG/MS's bundles and add-on additional cost to pay for Dropbox too. If I had to vote for a company least likely to succeed I'd pick Dropbox, and that's without any shade to the people running it. They're just in a terrible market position.
Man, I really wish they would focus on their primary storage offering. I _love_ Dropbox and have introduced many many friends and family to it.
That is testament how good and easy their storage offering is to use. This is where I've previously failed to convince the same group of people to use Google Drive / OneDrive.
I'm a fan of Dropbox but their leadership is lacking to say the least...
I recall on one earnings call Drew mentioned they launched Passwords. I checked it out and was shocked how completely broken and unusable it was. Never used it again and eventually it was discontinued.
The new thing they are pushing is Dash, their universal search. It makes a lot of sense, but their progress is very slow and I'm not sure they are able to compete, even though they have some distribution advantage.
The one thing that seems to be working for them is being lean and more efficient. In the last few years they laid off people and improved their margins and cash flows. They couldn't innovate their product so went the other way of let's just squeeze as much money from what we already have.
Why Dropbox doesn’t offer features adjacent to sync, like: end to end encryption for consumers, backup solutions like backblaze, S3-like buckets, controls like with S3 (like those related to IAM), tools to monitor folders and see analytics, flexible storage plans, equivalent of the Firefox/Bitwarden send, equivalent of services like ProtonDrive, and stop locking down ordinary features behind additional payment wall (even in paid plans, like using your available storage with more than one user for security and for defining scope for each device). My Dropbox Plus $120/year offers a fraction of what my managed nextcloud provides.
If you pay Dropbox 10$/month, you can’t set a damn password or expiry date to the file that you share. You have to pay even more for this simple feature.
Their password manager is limited to 50 passwords in their free plan. What these people are thinking?
Not only that, but also for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
90% of people misunderstand that comment entirely. It was about the value proposition of Dropbox as of early 2007 (and also about the specific announcement!) and their long-term profitability, if anything.
I feel like Dropbox has never figured out how to expand beyond folder sync. Which, it's still a fantastic folder-sync client and I'm a very happy customer of that product. But I mostly just have to swat away all the other things that pop up because I don't need them. And folder sync seems like a dying market, as fewer and fewer people work with files on disk
I always liked the file syncing part of Dropbox, and was considering their Family plan a few years back, until they increased the prices. If I remember correctly, their reasoning included all the additional features like Paper which you would get but that I never needed. It's currently at 203 EUR/year here - pretty steep if you only care about the core usecase of syncing files.
They have a super fast and slick file storage app. Some of the features that are natural additions to that feature set work quite well, like document scanning. But so much of what Dropbox does seems like they can't stay put and be happy with their core offering. Of course, they have to do this to increase revenue, for fear of becoming a mere commodity. It's tough.
We were among the first Paper users (starting from the private beta). We loved the product for the first few years, but then it stagnated. We finally switched away from it a year and a half ago.
Their export feature has been broken for over a year. Support hasn't helped, and our data is still trapped.
Well, saw that coming and too bad because for a moment and before notion took off, it had a chance. I gave up using it when critical notes I wrote in offline mode in the subway did not sync as I was lead to believe. Never touched it again.
Dropbox Paper was the best Notepad-like app in the market, only to Dropbox to completely stop developing it almost immediately and then eventually making it worse by making it Dropbox-backed and now killing the app. It's a shame really.
It's so strange that a company designed around syncing files created the .paper format which only stores a URL, and no actual content. It could have been a great Markdown client.
Guess they didn't want any customers thinking they could ever safely stop paying their subscription because "I have all my .paper files safe on my computer"
Good. I wish they'd stop adding new "apps" I don't want, and focus on being a handy little file sync and sharing solution. Some of my own pet peeves they did:
- re-wrote the software in such a way that files are temporarily locked right after they get written / modified (intermittently breaking utilities like VSO Image Resizer)
- made it increasingly difficult or impossible to deliberately remove the green checkmark overlay icons (used to be an easy Windows registry hack, now the software goes through all kinds of hoops to fight you and restore the way they want it)
Meh, they can shut it down simply by taking it private and arranging a sale to private equity, then loading it up with debt and stripping the assets. I don't see the big deal.
In 2020, Dropbox launched “new paper,” which turned the flat list of Paper documents on paper.Dropbox.com into literal files that live in your Dropbox folder. This was a staged rollout. Mine wasn’t migrated until five years later.
For a while, I could edit “paper files” that other team members created, and I could create paper docs on the old version (to the utter confusion of my team members), but I couldn’t create new paper files without duplicating a team member’s doc and deleting the content.
Now when I visit paper.Dropbox.com, all of my “old paper” docs are completely missing and I see an empty list (of what I presume are old-style docs.) :( I have local backups, but like, what’s the point of maintaining two separate services with the same name for five years?
Edit: Apparently my account was migrated in December 2024. I don’t know why the old interface is still accessible to me. A redirect or a message like “Check your ‘Migrated Paper Docs’ folder” would go a long way instead of showing an hauntingly empty list.
(I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)
> (I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)
I thought I had it lucky with my measly 25GB of lifetime storage. Have been using Dropbox for free for well over a decade – I would pay but their entry level plan far exceeds what I need.
App stores have been getting more annoying every year with new requirements for apps that aren't even updated. I just archived 3 apps I've built for people over the years but hosted for free but now the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I’m a long time Dropbox user and had no idea what Paper is (it’s a collaborative document editing thing). I can’t recall ever seeing it as part of the Dropbox brand or anyone using it. I might have even been interested in using it… Is this just me or did they really fail to market this product big time?
I for one am very happy if this marks the start of the downfall of the mobile app. They were a neat concept but ruined by the gatekeepers, and the web has evolved to the point where most are unnecessary.
The way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch.
Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago!
Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the potential. I think it's because the Dropbox founders were so consumer-focused that they couldn't envision how huge Paper could be in the productivity tools space. They kept framing it as an Evernote competitor, instead of seeing it turning into something like Notion.
Even when they finally seemed to understand that Dropbox was never going to be a B2C sensation, they kept acquiring "side product" businesses instead of ones that built on Dropbox's existing value. (To their credit, this was the zeitgeist back when they started — B2B was not cool at all, and the sort of B2C/B hybrid that exists now wasn't a thing.)
Meanwhile startups like Notion actually saw the opportunity and blossomed. And nowadays, even super-slow Google is releasing features like pageless mode, markdown support, etc. Such that Paper is almost irrelevant at this point, despite having had such a massive head start.
It's sad because I can easily imagine an alternate future where Dropbox understood what Paper could be, and invested in it alongside things like an Airtable competitor, to create a truly viable, and forward-looking alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Drive, without all the baggage of being a Microsoft Office clone.
"Thanks for subscribing to Dropbox Pro ianstormtaylor! Would you like to upgrade to Dropbox for Enterprise?"
"Thanks for sharing a file, ianstormtaylor, Dropbox for Business will do some bullshit"
Dropbox was a great product, but a shit company. They have a software platform and core technology that for B2B would readily displace high dollar stuff like managed file transfer and had a good early API that many apps took advantage of. I had a great experience working with them to capture shadow IT use of the product and get it in a managed environment.
But the relentless nagging, even of paying customers, is unserious and stupid. I wouldn't touch the product with a 10 foot pole.
Their unsubscribe process could be a study in dark patterns. It is so, so hostile ...
Dropbox saw that the only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box, and they did not like it. Also, we kept criticizing Dropbox for moving away from a "folder that syncs".
I agree with a folder that syncs. Today I use dropbox, but I do my best to avoid interacting with it, because just clicking on the menubar icon makes me upset that no feature there is what I actually need. No sensible ignore rules, etc.
But I could have been wrong and focusing on dropbox was not the only path. But even if it wasn't, they fumbled every promising product they could. I mean, Mailbox, they pioneered (read acquired) the email swipe UX, then killed it.
Then there was that launch where they hyped some iCloud sync service that would allow apps to store settings and game states, etc. Whatever happened to that?
Today I'm so afraid that dropbox's more daring products will die faster than Google can retire theirs, that I simply do not use it for anything other than a folder than syncs where I can share links. And now that I think about it, it's been a while since I had to share a single link, so maybe I can just move to synching.
> only B2C path for a company like them was to become Box
What does this mean? I used Box once in about 2011 at work (before Google and MS got serious with their "Drive" features my company had paid for Box) and my impression was actually "this is like if Dropbox were built by Oracle" -- worse than Dropbox in every way, both usability and performance, but with some corporate-tailored features. As a consumer, I would never have dreamed of switching to Box.
So that's why I'm curious what you mean by the comment with respect to B2C.
I mean exactly what you experienced. They did not go the enterprise way bc they did not want to become Box. They didn't think they could provide a good UX if they focused on enterprise.
They're not even a "folder that syncs" anymore, at least on android if you make a folder "available offline" (which should be the default to begin with) it stores it internally to the dropbox app where it can't be accessed by other apps. There is another button "Save to device", but that's just a one-time snapshot of the file that won't stay in sync. I deleted my account after they pulled that enshitification.
I am fairly certain that this was forced on them by google rather than a deliberate choice. Syncthing and other apps were put in the same position.
Yeah, Dropbox Paper remains the best pure writing experience I've ever used at work. I think Notion has a lot of nice features, but just writing in it still feels more cumbersome than Paper did a decade ago.
I completely agree. Paper was so frictionless that you could actually use it as a tool to think and sketch ideas with. Instead of Notion which feels clunky just to type in.
Stripe used to live and dir internally off of hackpad with some custom search engine attached to it. It was all binned after the Atlassianfication, but I don't think many devs saw the move away as positive.
Oh man, hackpad brings back memories. It was so simple. I liked Paper for the same reason.
In my experience Dropbox is actually really good at syncing data between devices.
It’s fast. It’s way more reliable than iCloud, and for “simply” keeping folders in sync just “simply” the best - for simple user requirements simplicity and reliability are key. Did I stress ‘simple’ enough? Maybe I should stress it Latin? Simplex veri sigillum.
I hope they stick to their core business.
Side note: Why do people like Notion? I just can't get into it. It feels like every time I type, some autocomplete thing pops up and stops my typing. I just went back to the good old Notes app.
As someone who switched from Dropbox Paper to Notion...
There's no question that Paper is a better pure writing experience. If you're viewing Notion as just a note-taking app and nothing else, I think you're misunderstanding what it's for.
For starters, it's way easier to organize stuff in Notion than Paper. This is less a feature of Notion, and more of a terrible limitation of Paper. Paper was stuck with the "files within folders" model. Just the fact that Notion lets you control what shows up in the navigation sidebar was a huge time saver for me. And being able to create pages within pages within pages (which is very different from having sibling documents inside a folder) made it much more flexible for organizing everything.
But the real power of Notion is when you start to treat it as a database builder rather than a note-taking tool. Yes, it's useful for taking notes, but those notes are about something, and with tools like Paper, Obsidian, etc., the thing is always living somewhere else.
With Notion, I was able to make a database of projects and another database of tasks which linked to those projects. Each developer on my team has a custom dashboard showing just the tasks that are assigned to them and currently in-progress. I have a totally different view showing all the projects going on right now. And then each of those tasks have a pretty good (I admit it's not great) note-taking feature. The notes are living within the actual object you're taking notes about, which is totally different from Paper.
I even use Notion for personal stuff. I have a Notion form that my wife and I use to enter things we need to buy next time we're at the store. And there's a view showing the things we need to buy from each separate store with checkboxes next to each one so it's easy to remove them when we're done. There's a separate database listing the movies we want to watch, with a view for all the ones we previously watched, and when. I have a database of cocktail recipes along with ingredient lists (so I can easily filter by ingredient), formulas to calculate different volumes based on how many drinks you're making, a rating system, etc.
Basically, if you look at Notion as a bucket of unstructured notes with a markdown editor, I agree, it's nothing special. But that's not what it really is.
I have tried several times - real genuine multi-week efforts - but I'm with you. It never worked for me. I can see potential in there but it's just too much, for too little in return.
Edit mode by default is what makes Notion grating for me. Way too easy to unintentionally modify org docs. It badly needs an edit mode toggle button.
It's possible to lock pages in Notion (from the ... menu on the page), which prevents editing without unlocking. Most org-level pages in our workspace are locked. People also typically lock project pages after they ship, for example.
Notion feels like Python transpiled to React, brought to you by the Atlassian Jira team.
I do not enjoy it at all, and I hope Obsidian eats their lunch.
I'm with you. I've been working on making Obsidian great for work with real-time collaboration, SSO, and the ability to have fully private document collaboration [0].
Performance aside, it's crazy that in the age of Claude Code people don't insist on having their docs local, private, and in markdown.
[0] https://relay.md
So far the Obsidian folks don’t seem interested in our lunch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Easy sharing, easy to make pages public, good syntax highlighting, decent search.
Here is the thing: Dropbox has no business being anything other than a cloud storage solution. Stop trying to do everything, it's too difficult and too expensive. Find what you're great at, and just improve it little by little. Stop adding shit.
Never, ever used any additional Dropbox services. All I need it to do is be a reliable cloud storage. Nothing else.
Okay… but then Google Drive is cheaper and has all these other features, so I switched to it, and stopped paying Dropbox, so I guess you’re wrong?
Lower the price below Google Drive and be better at being Google Drive than Google is. It wouldn't be that hard. You wouldn't need to be more expensive if you weren't pissing money away on acquisitions no one wants all the time.
ah yes, make your product cheaper than the same thing from company that has the greatest number of free software offerings with the largest user bases in the world
Dropbox has one key advantage.
Block based syncing.
Didn't Google add this in October 2024: https://support.google.com/a/answer/7577057?hl=en
The changelog states: "Added support for “differential” uploads. When large files are edited, Drive for desktop will now upload only the parts of the file that changed."
If they did I'm jumping ship. Was literally my only reason for staying on Dropbox
TIL. For some reason I thought Drive for Desktop was discontinued years ago. Nice to see the regular updates.
Okay, but let's say Google implements that. Than Dropbox is toast, right?
It's such a shame, because I absolutely believe that simpler products which focus on one thing and do it well are basically always a better user experience (and I personally try to use them wherever possible). But I think the business case is hard.
If they did I'll switch to Google. It's the only reason I use Dropbox over others like OneDrive.
You have no business telling anyone what their business is. Dropbox has "business" doing whatever they want to try to make great products, achieve their mission and turn over some cash.
How is it your business telling other people what to say? Isn't it similarly "whatever they want"?
> Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then
Except that you had to have everyone use a Dropbox account. So if you are already in bed with Google as a company, adding Dropbox for everyone might not be such a fun idea.
I loved the original hackpad. I used it for personal task management at a time when I was really struggling to keep on task at a job.
RIP Paper
The revenge of BrandonM...
In case anyone else also has to look it up:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27067281
So far this year they've discontinued Paper (app), Passwords, Send and Track, Vault and Capture. Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones!
Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.
On the other hand, they are adding tons of invisible yet useful features like auto OCR on PDFs, auto-transcription of audio files, a much better search, etc.
It's not suitable to store anything that sensitive, but for regular stuff, they are becoming a powerhouse, and the web app allows you to work very efficiently and fast.
I personally like Dropbox, and don't find the direction they're heading ill-advised.
The direction is great. The communication and customer support leave a lot to be desired.
The thing is, its hard to have a product thats important to you and does cool things but also you don't rely on for anything crucial. Esp when its file storage.
> you don't rely on for anything crucial. Esp when its file storage.
Crucial and sensitive are different things. I trust them with the files I actively and regularly use, but I don't trust them with anything that needs encryption, which is a tiny sliver of what I have in terms of files.
Keeping things backed up is an entirely different conversation, though.
That is far afield what I'd consider appropriate use of my data. I'll be discontinuing my very old subscription.
Are these opt in?
> Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.
Ironically I stopped using Dropbox when they started trying to branch out into all the other stuff. I doubt I'll go back at this point though.
I stopped using Dropbox when they started limiting free accounts to three devices and I suddenly got a lot of confused and irritated messages from all the people I'd evangelized into using Dropbox.
what did you end up using for file storage?
I wrote off paper when they announced (later 2019) that everyone would be migrated to the new storage in a few months and then kept pushing the date out over the next four years.
It seemed that they were not allocating any resources to the project.
I did check back every year or so for entertainment purposes. Mine was migrated in November of 2024.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200615075409/https://www.dropb...
To my best understanding, my old paper documents were just deleted. I can still log into the old paper.Dropbox.com but see an empty list. I assume this means my account was never migrated.
Around November 2024, mine were all moved to a folder tree "Migrated Paper Docs" in my dropbox in a folder tree, as .paper files. The web UI says the folder has 84 decedents. My backup, done through the API years ago has 118, but there may be some deleted ones in there.
If I go to paper.dropbox.com, I only see six under "starred" in the left hand side (after unfolding the tree) and two in the main area. After opening another starred one, which links into dropbox, the main area now shows three.
So the migration to dropbox did mostly work for me, but whatever was left at paper.dropbox.com is messed up.
> Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones!
Oh that's great! I currently use OneDrive because of Personal Vault (and other smaller reasons), because no one else offered something like it. I didn't even know about Vault, but I guess that's for the better because I wouldn't want the folder holding my ID etc. becoming accessible to every single app connected to my Dropbox.
There had to have been a better way to discontinue it. Even making the folder require migration on next access would've been better than silently worsening it.
Why rely on them at all? Dollar per GB they cost more than literally any other solution with file storage.
Years ago, their desktop client was the only one among popular similar services that supported proper delta sync while also covering all major platforms. Absolutely indispensable if you used it with things like TrueCrypt containers, where changing one byte within would cause most sync clients to resend the whole 50 GB, or however large it was. Dropbox handled this fine and would finish in a couple of seconds (actually sending new data, not just pretending it did that).
I don't know how it is these days, wouldn't be surprised if other commercial services still haven't figured it out.
Google Drive added delta sync this year, while OneDrive added it in 2020 apparently.
I also overstayed with Dropbox for that reason, and now I don't see a real reason for their higher $/GB. Though their client is more stable than Google Drive from my experience (which randomly stops working on Windows often enough), OneDrive has been rock solid for me on both Windows and macOS.
I do this with a WebDAV server (Fastmail Files) by breaking up my encrypted volume into 10MiB chunks, so that the sync has the granularity of that, plus a FUSE script to present the directory containing the chunks as a single block device for mounting. Obviously not cross-platform though.
AFAIK that's still their USP.
The only cloud storage that has a decent Linux client is Dropbox.
Koofr is a decent cloud solution. Their client is horrendous across all platforms and lacks the most basic functionalities.
You can argue OneDrive / GoogleDrive are semi decent if you also use insync, which adds another license to purchase when a basic client should come free with the service you've already bought.
And no, rsync doesn't come even close to it in terms of functionality/simplicity, no matter how much hardened Linux users who haven't been outside since 1988 are trying to convince everyone otherwise.
I can recommend JottaCloud.
Because they provide nice features on top of basic file storage. If you use them, they justify the cost. If you don't need them, there's always pCloud.
With either Google or Microsoft, you get a complete office suite for the same price including storage
Right, and that's what Dropbox Paper was probably originally an attempt at working toward, from the opposite direction — "We have Google Drive, now we just need Google Docs."
It should be obvious that "a whole collaborative office suite" is not the kind of thing a regular company can build as an extension play... but somehow some manager inside Dropbox convinced them that direction was possible. At least for a while. Seems they've gradually come to their senses.
For various reasons, I have all three of them. There are some missing things in Google and Microsoft's offerings. Namely:
1. App integration (3rd parties can access to a single folder in your Dropbox, allowing "purchase to Dropbox" directly. Many merchants automatically update the files if they receive updates, too.
2. Auto OCR, incl. handwriting. My old comics which are not English are OCRd, and I can do full-text search inside them, which is very useful for me.
3. Fast, auto transcription in many languages. I needed a transcription of a file recently. All services needed memberships, etc. I did it from Google cloud API toolbox. However when I uploaded the the same file to Dropbox, I saw a transcription button. It produced equally good results in way less time.
4. Send-a-copy (aka Transfer). I don't want to share and try to remember to disable links. My Dropbox membership contains a complete "WeTransfer" replacement, and I use it a lot.
5. Request files. I open a link, people send in the files I need, then the "dropbox" closes automatically. I get notifications for uploads, too.
6. Funnily, a working Linux client.
...and possibly more I don't use or can't remember right now.
Does dropbox still N-way "double dip" on #1 by counting the shared folders against your and the authors storage?
The Linux client is what did it for me, and why I am still using it.
I'm still sad what they did to the Mailbox app...
I am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used.
I would love for them to implement:
- The ability to exclude folders from syncing - useful for .venv etc
- The ability to sync folders outside of the dropbox folder
- Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html
> They still have the best sync engine[...]
If you mean differential sync (or "delta sync"), Google Drive added it this year and OneDrive added it a few years ago. Google Drive's client is much worse than Dropbox's, though, with it just randomly breaking on Windows often. I've had good experiences with OneDrive on Windows & macOS, though.
According to this post a dropbox employee made on the dropbox subreddit, excluding things from syncing may be coming soon https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/1mc86hi/cut_the_cl...
If you’re open to third-party sync clients, Maestral supports this:
https://maestral.app/docs/mignore
I’ve been loving Maestral so far, it’s just the syncing, none of the other stuff. It has some downsides (it can’t upload symlinks but it can download them, and it doesn’t have LAN sync) but it’s super lightweight.
AFAIK Maestral doesn’t have block level diff and sync which is the main reason (for me) to use Dropbox: their superior sync engine
I have Maestral (and rclone) running on my raspbi but wouldn’t use it for things like sparsebundle syncing
> Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html
I made a plugin that make this possible from the Filestash client (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). If you navigate to /public/{shareID}/ you will see your site
Good. That app was horrible. I'd get a notification of a comment and 90% of the time it wouldn't load the comment, so I'd have to scroll to the bottom where the comments were and I couldn't tell what the comment related to so I'd reload the link and hope for the it to properly highlight the text and show the comment and that would work maybe 40% of the time. Editing text was frustrating as well.
If they provide a better web experience I'm all for this.
What Dropbox has been doing to Paper has been so sad to me. I've been a daily user for almost a decade (and Hackpad before that), and their recent move into combining it into Dropbox itself has caused me to almost completely stop.
I get what they're doing... unifying everything into one system. I get it. But I can't find any of my docs anymore. When I go to paper.dropbox.com, where there use to be thousands of docs, there's now nothing.
The app wasn't great, but it was better than nothing.
after they combined paper I got a new folder called Paper docs in my account which had all of my paper docs I'd normally see on paper.dropbox.com. Did you not get that folder?
I have it but most of my docs aren’t in it. They can only be accessed via direct link. The folder is also not accessible from paper.dropbox.com on mobile, which is more important now that the app is gone.
I wrote to support and they told me there’s nothing they can do.
(And even if the docs were in it… now I’m a few clicks away from my docs which is way worse than before.)
I'm continually impressed that Dropbox continues to exist, so long after their primary product offering was so thoroughly sherlocked by the big two B2C companies (Google and Apple) and the big two B2B companies (MS and Google). Especially because I've never worked anywhere that used Dropbox, so they don't have the long-tail life support legacy B2B money keeping them afloat like say, Lotus Notes did.
B2C was lost to them the minute Google Drive and iCloud Drive both got decent enough. Clearly with all their random acquisitions and stuff they were trying to become a #3 to MS and Google for corporate, but it's such a moat to penetrate, since they'd have to become at least a little better than at least one of them at most of the big productivity things (email, calendar, documents & drive, chat, meetings), or be a lot better at one specific thing, enough that businesses will have an appetite to keep paying for GOOG/MS's bundles and add-on additional cost to pay for Dropbox too. If I had to vote for a company least likely to succeed I'd pick Dropbox, and that's without any shade to the people running it. They're just in a terrible market position.
agree, also I believe box.com was smaller than Dropbox and it seems like they’re still alive, it’s crazy to me.
Furthermore, they're both public listed companies.
Man, I really wish they would focus on their primary storage offering. I _love_ Dropbox and have introduced many many friends and family to it.
That is testament how good and easy their storage offering is to use. This is where I've previously failed to convince the same group of people to use Google Drive / OneDrive.
I'm a fan of Dropbox but their leadership is lacking to say the least...
I recall on one earnings call Drew mentioned they launched Passwords. I checked it out and was shocked how completely broken and unusable it was. Never used it again and eventually it was discontinued.
The new thing they are pushing is Dash, their universal search. It makes a lot of sense, but their progress is very slow and I'm not sure they are able to compete, even though they have some distribution advantage.
The one thing that seems to be working for them is being lean and more efficient. In the last few years they laid off people and improved their margins and cash flows. They couldn't innovate their product so went the other way of let's just squeeze as much money from what we already have.
Dropbox is example of a bad company.
Why Dropbox doesn’t offer features adjacent to sync, like: end to end encryption for consumers, backup solutions like backblaze, S3-like buckets, controls like with S3 (like those related to IAM), tools to monitor folders and see analytics, flexible storage plans, equivalent of the Firefox/Bitwarden send, equivalent of services like ProtonDrive, and stop locking down ordinary features behind additional payment wall (even in paid plans, like using your available storage with more than one user for security and for defining scope for each device). My Dropbox Plus $120/year offers a fraction of what my managed nextcloud provides.
If you pay Dropbox 10$/month, you can’t set a damn password or expiry date to the file that you share. You have to pay even more for this simple feature.
Their password manager is limited to 50 passwords in their free plan. What these people are thinking?
Not only that, but also for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.
They won't last.
I got that reference. Don’t worry king
the company lost $500 million last year, it's possible that comment might still be correct
90% of people misunderstand that comment entirely. It was about the value proposition of Dropbox as of early 2007 (and also about the specific announcement!) and their long-term profitability, if anything.
Their password manager is dead now... As is Send and Track, which allowed analytics like you describe.
I feel like Dropbox has never figured out how to expand beyond folder sync. Which, it's still a fantastic folder-sync client and I'm a very happy customer of that product. But I mostly just have to swat away all the other things that pop up because I don't need them. And folder sync seems like a dying market, as fewer and fewer people work with files on disk
I always liked the file syncing part of Dropbox, and was considering their Family plan a few years back, until they increased the prices. If I remember correctly, their reasoning included all the additional features like Paper which you would get but that I never needed. It's currently at 203 EUR/year here - pretty steep if you only care about the core usecase of syncing files.
They have a super fast and slick file storage app. Some of the features that are natural additions to that feature set work quite well, like document scanning. But so much of what Dropbox does seems like they can't stay put and be happy with their core offering. Of course, they have to do this to increase revenue, for fear of becoming a mere commodity. It's tough.
We were among the first Paper users (starting from the private beta). We loved the product for the first few years, but then it stagnated. We finally switched away from it a year and a half ago.
Their export feature has been broken for over a year. Support hasn't helped, and our data is still trapped.
A sad end for a once promising product.
It's one thing to discontinue something - is there a reason it's not open sources it for the users that prefer to use it?
It's odd that every software must sufficiently be for everyone, or bust.
Well, saw that coming and too bad because for a moment and before notion took off, it had a chance. I gave up using it when critical notes I wrote in offline mode in the subway did not sync as I was lead to believe. Never touched it again.
Does notion have a proper offline sync mode these days? I was under the impression that it doesn’t either
Went back to apple notes and email until Obsidian came along..
Dropbox Paper was the best Notepad-like app in the market, only to Dropbox to completely stop developing it almost immediately and then eventually making it worse by making it Dropbox-backed and now killing the app. It's a shame really.
It's so strange that a company designed around syncing files created the .paper format which only stores a URL, and no actual content. It could have been a great Markdown client.
Guess they didn't want any customers thinking they could ever safely stop paying their subscription because "I have all my .paper files safe on my computer"
It’s the same thing Google Drive does with your Google docs
Oh no, anyway
Good. I wish they'd stop adding new "apps" I don't want, and focus on being a handy little file sync and sharing solution. Some of my own pet peeves they did:
- got rid of Public folder support, in spite of user outcry (https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101001014/ending-su...)
- re-wrote the software in such a way that files are temporarily locked right after they get written / modified (intermittently breaking utilities like VSO Image Resizer)
- made it increasingly difficult or impossible to deliberately remove the green checkmark overlay icons (used to be an easy Windows registry hack, now the software goes through all kinds of hoops to fight you and restore the way they want it)
- IIRC for a while they introduced AI feature default settings that would hoover up your document contents without consent (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/dropb...)
HN saw the birth of Dropbox; I hope we don't see the death of it here.
Meh, they can shut it down simply by taking it private and arranging a sale to private equity, then loading it up with debt and stripping the assets. I don't see the big deal.
The video review and transcription tools have been game changing for us.
In 2020, Dropbox launched “new paper,” which turned the flat list of Paper documents on paper.Dropbox.com into literal files that live in your Dropbox folder. This was a staged rollout. Mine wasn’t migrated until five years later.
For a while, I could edit “paper files” that other team members created, and I could create paper docs on the old version (to the utter confusion of my team members), but I couldn’t create new paper files without duplicating a team member’s doc and deleting the content.
Now when I visit paper.Dropbox.com, all of my “old paper” docs are completely missing and I see an empty list (of what I presume are old-style docs.) :( I have local backups, but like, what’s the point of maintaining two separate services with the same name for five years?
Edit: Apparently my account was migrated in December 2024. I don’t know why the old interface is still accessible to me. A redirect or a message like “Check your ‘Migrated Paper Docs’ folder” would go a long way instead of showing an hauntingly empty list.
(I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)
> (I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)
I thought I had it lucky with my measly 25GB of lifetime storage. Have been using Dropbox for free for well over a decade – I would pay but their entry level plan far exceeds what I need.
First password, now paper, what's going on at Dropbox?
Steve nailed it when he said - you are just a feature.
Does it support mobile web?
Why are they killing the app?
>Why are they killing the app?
Cutting the maintenance cost I guess.
That app hasn't been touched in years. I doubt the cost was that high.
App stores have been getting more annoying every year with new requirements for apps that aren't even updated. I just archived 3 apps I've built for people over the years but hosted for free but now the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
I’m a long time Dropbox user and had no idea what Paper is (it’s a collaborative document editing thing). I can’t recall ever seeing it as part of the Dropbox brand or anyone using it. I might have even been interested in using it… Is this just me or did they really fail to market this product big time?
I for one am very happy if this marks the start of the downfall of the mobile app. They were a neat concept but ruined by the gatekeepers, and the web has evolved to the point where most are unnecessary.
notion ate there lunch
notion will eventually suffer the same fate, they all do...
Notions been profitable every year I’ve worked there so we at least seem to have a business
the real test of leadership is what happens when the line plateaus, very few accept the ceiling
moar ai, probably
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