How does shared business account storage work?

[Murmur]

This is probably a simple question, but I haven't been able to find a clear answer. We just created a business account for our small team. We often work with freelancers who need access to edit and upload files in certain project folders. If we share one of these folders with edit access to someone outside our team and they add content to the folder in our team folder, does this utilize their personal dropbox space or ours? Thanks!

[Jay]

Hi @Murmur, thanks for bringing this to our attention.

This article should answer your questions regarding the use of shared folders, and how they affect quota. 

In general, shared folders take up quota on all members' accounts, so the freelancers (if they're not members of your team) would need enough space on their own account to add the folder and edit them.

If you have any further queries, feel free to message back.

[Murmur]

Thank you, so if the freelancer adds to a folder within our team folder, that counts against both us and the freelancer? This is very confusing. We are paying for a certain amount of space. Is there no way for an outsider to utilize the space that we already pay for without negatively affecting their own quota? We can work around this with something like - Freelancer sends file via WeTransfer, a team member uploads file to our storage - but it is unfortunate that we need to create a workaround for storage we already paying for. 

[Murmur]

Just one other thought. Freelancer work that is uploaded to a shared folder should then be owned by our team, but if it is using up storage on the freelancer's account it seems we would need to worry about the freelancer later deleting the files. If they delete files they've added to a folder that  we've shared from our team folder, will those files disappear on our end?

[Jay]

The only way for other users to user your quota would be to join your Dropbox team, which would require a new paid license, and the merging of their Dropbox account to your team, which isn't suitable for most users (given their own personal files).

Regarding your second question, edit access also means the ability to delete files from the shared folder, so they could delete your files.

You could use a file request link instead for them to upload files directly to your account, without using any of their quota. This article might also help with more information on shared folders. 

[Murmur]

Thanks again for your reply!

I guess that all makes sense, but in case there is an opportunity for feedback, this will unfortunately impact our decision to use Dropbox, as we cannot expect every freelancer to have a dropbox account, let alone the available space to work within our large projects. It would make more sense for a business account to have a space quota to which anyone could contribute, but which the company has control over and is outside of any single user's subscription. To use up both account's space feels like double dipping and a little anti-consumer. 

Again, I appreciate your responsiveness to our inquiries!