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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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'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.
Dropbox is the place where cool products go to die.. there are a ton of new products popping up that can replace Paper. I started using Scrap and found it really easy, although their dark mode sucks.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrap-notetaking/id6752312339
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ianstormtaylor|5 months ago
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.
Spooky23|5 months ago
"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.
figassis|5 months ago
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.
Hovertruck|5 months ago
hibikir|5 months ago
catoc|5 months ago
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.
aurareturn|5 months ago
a0123|5 months ago
Never, ever used any additional Dropbox services. All I need it to do is be a reliable cloud storage. Nothing else.
dylan604|5 months ago
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.
steviedotboston|5 months ago
varenc|5 months ago
Apocryphon|5 months ago
rjh29|5 months ago
Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.
bayindirh|5 months ago
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.
AlexandrB|5 months ago
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.
dunham|5 months ago
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...
smileybarry|5 months ago
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.
privatelypublic|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
urda|5 months ago
patapong|5 months ago
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
smileybarry|5 months ago
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.
plasticsoprano|5 months ago
jez|5 months ago
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.
mickael-kerjean|5 months ago
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
plasticsoprano|5 months ago
If they provide a better web experience I'm all for this.
gkoberger|5 months ago
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.
plasticsoprano|5 months ago
xp84|5 months ago
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.
bithavoc|5 months ago
tartartar45|5 months ago
1a527dd5|5 months ago
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.
tinyhouse|5 months ago
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.
aborsy|5 months ago
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?
margalabargala|5 months ago
They won't last.
xdfgh1112|5 months ago
REPLicated2|5 months ago
brundolf|5 months ago
pradn|5 months ago
nicholasjbs|5 months 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.
petetnt|5 months ago
faramarz|5 months ago
gcr|5 months ago
j45|5 months ago
It's odd that every software must sufficiently be for everyone, or bust.
kepano|5 months ago
xp84|5 months ago
jitl|5 months ago
incubo4u|5 months ago
rkagerer|5 months ago
- 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...)
system2|5 months ago
CamperBob2|5 months ago
imagetic|5 months ago
gcr|5 months ago
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)
challenger-derp|5 months ago
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.
h1fra|5 months ago
tibbydudeza|5 months ago
reilly3000|5 months ago
Why are they killing the app?
hiroshi3110|5 months ago
Cutting the maintenance cost I guess.
marton_s|5 months ago
mvdtnz|5 months ago
lyime|5 months ago
micromacrofoot|5 months ago
curtisszmania|5 months ago
[deleted]
techlatest_net|5 months ago
[deleted]