So, I have a Dropbox account, Basic plan.  To be transparent, my personal storage is OneDrive based, but a registered Australian community charity I'm involved with uses Dropbox for some functions.  There are two main people in the charity that each have separate Dropbox accounts.

Anyway, when one of them shares files/folder from one of their Dropbox accounts, the storage is then deducted from my own account.  So, they are paying for their storage, but when they share, it fills mine up and Dropbox keeps prompting me to upgrade.

Now, it's sort of fair I suppose, although it's a different model to how OneDrive works (each to their own), but my Dropbox usage is probably less than 20MB, but the content the charity shares is significantly more than that and I frequently keep getting told I've hit the 2GB Basic account limit and cannot accept any additional shared content.

Are the people who are sharing to me (and colleagues) sharing in the wrong way?  Is there a 'share but don't consume the other person's storage' option?

And, as I said, my personal storage is well served by OneDrive, and I cannot justify an upgrade to a paid Dropbox account, when to my mind, someone has already paid for that storage.

I hope I've explained this adequately.  And I hope someone can either tell me that this is either just the way Dropbox does it, or suggest how to 'fix' it.

Thanks.

So, I have a Dropbox account, Basic plan.  To be transparent, my personal storage is OneDrive based, but a registered Australian community charity I'm involved with uses Dropbox for some functions.  There are two main people in the charity that each have separate Dropbox accounts.

Anyway, when one of them shares files/folder from one of their Dropbox accounts, the storage is then deducted from my own account.  So, they are paying for their storage, but when they share, it fills mine up and Dropbox keeps prompting me to upgrade.

Now, it's sort of fair I suppose, although it's a different model to how OneDrive works (each to their own), but my Dropbox usage is probably less than 20MB, but the content the charity shares is significantly more than that and I frequently keep getting told I've hit the 2GB Basic account limit and cannot accept any additional shared content.

Are the people who are sharing to me (and colleagues) sharing in the wrong way?  Is there a 'share but don't consume the other person's storage' option?

And, as I said, my personal storage is well served by OneDrive, and I cannot justify an upgrade to a paid Dropbox account, when to my mind, someone has already paid for that storage.

I hope I've explained this adequately.  And I hope someone can either tell me that this is either just the way Dropbox does it, or suggest how to 'fix' it.

Thanks.

Hi cooperp 

You are right in your assumption that anything in your Dropbox uses your space, so, yes, if you need access to shared folders with read/write access then you need enough space to host and store that. There is no option to change that. 

If you dont need read/write access you can ask for a shared link instead. 

Thanks for the quick reply.  I actually do not need write, only read, so I'll let the 'administrators' know.  Fantastic.

I just ran into this issue, as a paid user trying to share large files to someone with a free account. Seems pretty shady of dropbox to me, it's not like they are duplicating the server use when I share something I've already paid to have stored. So basically dropbox is using my paid account to force someone else to pay to access something I want them to be able to use from within my own paid account.

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MrWyrd wrote:
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... it's not like they are duplicating the server use when I share something I've already paid to have stored.

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Storage isn't the only consideration as bandwidth is also needed, unless the person you're sharing with won't be downloading the files. The policy is also in effect to prevent people from stacking accounts for unlimited storage.