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Dropbox kills unlimited storage plans due to abuse from crypto miners

Dropbox has announced that its offer of unlimited storage is coming to an end as abuse from some users has led to the risks of “creating an unreliable experience for all of our customers.”

In a post this morning, Dropbox has announced that unlimited storage will come to an end. The storage and backup platform has offered unlimited storage under its “Advanced” plan for business customers with the idea that this would allow businesses to scale their storage needs without worrying about upgrading their tier or running into inflating costs.

That’s now ending as a result of abuse.

Crypto miners and “resellers” are cited as the main reason for pulling the functionality, as Dropbox says these customers are using “thousands of times more storage than our genuine business customers” and that such abuse is against the policy of these accounts. Dropbox says that the policy “has always been to provide as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case.”

Going forward, Dropbox’s Advanced plan will offer 15TB of storage shared among a team of at least three licenses. Adding more licenses beyond three will add 5TB of additional storage.

Starting today, customers who purchase a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will receive 15TB of storage space shared by the team—enough space to store about 100 million documents, 4 million photos or 7500 hours of HD video. Each additional active license will receive 5TB of storage. 

Existing customers using less than 35TB of storage will be able to keep all of that storage, plus an additional 5TB, for five years at no additional charge. Customers using more than 35TB, less than 1% according to Dropbox, will be contacted to discuss options but will continue to be able to use up to 1,000TB. Existing customers will also not move to the new policy until at least November 1.

This, notably, comes not long after Google cracked down on unlimited storage on Drive. New customers lost access to unlimited storage back in 2020, and unlimited documents also came to an end in 2022.

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Avatar for Ben Schoon Ben Schoon

Ben is a Senior Editor for 9to5Google.

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