What are the new Dropbox Business plans?

Wouldn't it have made more sense to keep the pricing of the Advanced plan to approximately what users are paying now, and then offer the Standard plan at a cheaper price?

I ask because a 60% increase is too much to swallow for a file storage service.  For the same price as the Advanced plan ($20/user-month), an organization can get an E3 license of Office 365 which would include the Office products, Exchange e-mail, a 1TB per user OneDrive account for file storage/collaboration, and a 1TB + 0.5GB/user SharePoint storage limit (up to 25TB max).  In our organization's case (35 Dropbox users using less than 1TB), that's 35TB of OneDrive and 18.5TB of SharePoint storage.  The Standard plan isn't an option because we require HIPAA compliance.

This post isn't intended to be an ad for Office 365.  It's a plea for Dropbox to reconsider their pricing strategy.

These are some really disappointing changes –and extremely heavy-handed price increases– from a company we've previously championed.

Dropbox Business has been our go-to file sync & share recommendation for small- to medium-size business clients but from the price increase but subsequent feature reduction it's become apparent that this market is either not really Dropbox's focus, or it's one that they think they can milk for all its worth… (but I'm not sure the feature set even with SmartSync is that compelling to justify the extreme price premium…)

It's all just a bit disheartening to be honest, and in many ways has a whiff of bait 'n switch. For example a lot of the AdminX features now being touted for the Advanced tier have been in Early Access for months, and in fact the features they offered were inducements for some of our clients to finally get onboard with Dropbox.

At no point were there even rumblings that upon general release those new features would be locked behind higher-priced tiers, let alone this much higher.

Yet by offering those features in early access and soliciting feedback and testing from paying customers Dropbox ends up to be treating those (presumably valued) customers as simple dumb guinea pigs, so they can turn around and stick them with a higher bill to continue to use the features they helped Dropbox develop.

It definitely doesn’t engender loyalty or any warm feelings toward the company, and I suspect come 2018 Dropbox will see a fair number of businesses leaving for sync 'n share competitors who can now jump under the price umbrella Dropbox has left wide open.

New plans and pricing structure, and I can see that our SMB will be squeezed out of what we need if we don't want the huge price increase.
Our current plan Teams Plan is AU$850 per year and the new Dropbox Business Standard is AU$1,050 per year. We currently need the auditing and advanced admin console and would be looking at the Dropbox Business Advanced at AU$1,650 per year which is almost double the cost of what it is now.

I can't see our company using Dropbox in the future because on the price increase.

EDIT: We're looking at switching to https://www.syncplicity.com/solutions/

According to the FAQ and e-mail I received (emphasis Dropbox's): 

• Advanced adds sophisticated admin, audit, and security tools, with as much space as you need. This plan’s feature set is most similar to that of your existing plan

The new price for the feature set most similar to that of my existing plan costs 75% more than my existing plan (60% more than the new Standard option).  Why not keep the pricing of the Advanced plan to approximately what users are paying now and offer the Standard plan at a cheaper price?  We use less than 1TB across 35 users, but we require HIPAA compliance and long-term file recovery for discovery purposes so the Standard plan isn't an option for us.

We also subscribe to Microsoft's Office 365 (E3 licenses) for the same price as the Dropbox Advanced plan ($20/user-month) which includes the Office products, hosted Exchange e-mail, etc.  We currently don't use the included storage options because we were already using Dropbox and find it easier to use.

The O365 features above are beyond the scope of what we expect from Dropbox, but from a strictly-storage perspective our O365 licenses also include:

1. A 1TB per user OneDrive account for file storage/collaboration
2. A 1TB + 0.5GB/user SharePoint storage limit (up to 25TB max).
3. HIPAA compliance, file recovery, and a very comprehensive admin/security feature set.

In our organization's case that's 35TB of OneDrive storage and ~1TB of SharePoint storage.  

While I imagine there are some Microsoft resellers salivating at the Dropbox Business customers they'll grab, we really hope Dropbox will reconsider their pricing strategy.  I'd like to know the likelihood of that happening.  The new pricing won't take effect for 19 months for us, but we need to evaluate whether we'll be around that long if we'll have to switch (i.e. Dropbox keeps the 60% increase) anyway.

I received an email about this just now, and I'm confused. It says:

Thanks for being a loyal Dropbox Business customer. We want to let you know about some upcoming changes to your plan.

farther down...

• Advanced adds sophisticated admin, audit, and security tools, with as much space as you need. This plan’s feature set is most similar to that of your existing plan

(emphasis mine)

The problem with all this is that I'm a Dropbox Pro subscriber. It says so in my profile. So was this email sent to me in error, or have I been unknowingly paying for a higher tier all this time?

We have just received notice that you, as a company, are moving from a business account to a four tiered ‘pro’ ‘standard’ ‘advanced’ and ‘enterprise’ system for Dropbox, with our account being shifted to an ‘advanced’ system (usability as of now, price as of next year),

By the looks of it we’d most likely want a ‘standard’ account (mostly because of the price!), however this does get rid of the ‘tiered admin’ abilities, would this then mean we’d only be able to have one admin for the account? In which case, what would the other members not be able to do? I understand the accounts do not get upgraded in terms of price till next year, can you confirm this?

Also I’ve seen you are moving from unlimited version history to 120 days for all your higher accounts, as a business we would need unlimited version control and so we have ‘opted in’ for now, would this then revert to 120 days in January 2018 or would we keep unlimited version control from now on?

On the other side, Dropbox is doing pretty good in 2016, with many great features released over the year. I can understand that they need to restructure their subscription plans to gain enough capital to go even further. I guess what they need is just some adjustments to the new plans to keep the impact to existing customers minimal.

i can see most of these ideas and fins soultions but i have a question that asks, how many users can i have in the advanced buisness plan, at the moment i have 5 plus 5 TB of stoage....what will it be now ? its not clear

Tony