1. You must be 18 to use Dropbox. Previously, you had to be 13 if in the United States, or 16 if higher. Dropbox may use information "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."
2. Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months. Previously, it was 12 months.
3. If you have multiple accounts tied to the same email address, and one is banned, the others may also be banned.
4. "Refunds are only issued if required by law." -> "Refunds are only issued in limited circumstances or if required by law."
5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. Previously, it was only if you continued to use the service.
It would also potentially invalidate clauses like the one in GPL license too: "this version or any later version" — how can anyone consent to yet-unknown terms?
In this particular case and going after the summary from big85, there's one case of legal compliance (like age restrictions — it applies in appropriate jurisdictions even if the ToS is not updated) or maybe two (banning per-account vs per-owner), some widening of the terms to the benefit of the customer (like refunds being permitted in "special circumstances" on top of "required by law, with only "reductionist" change being about lowering service window for unused free accounts (in some jurisdictions, even this could be about respecting data privacy laws — companies are obligated to remove any data which is not used after a certain time, though I think this is 12 months even under GDPR).
As such, I believe this would not be a good case where you can bring enough light how this type of clause is harming one side to the contract.
For "this or any later version", I have always read this line as you get to choose which version you want to follow, not the one granting you the licence.
Amazing Dropbox went from a brilliantly simple service to this stagnating corporate swamp of ooze. Yet another fascinating example of how headcount correlates with quality decline.
The pricing got very complicated, that part is true. On the other hand, service quality didn’t go down. They added many small features which makes things easier, on the other hand.
I use a bunch of additional services they offer. They work well, make me spend less money and save my time (e.g.: send, transcription, advanced sharing controls).
I guess teenagers don't have any need to sync files, eh? Hate to see this gradual erosion of internet access for young people - I'd bet half the notable members of this very site started their career trajectory by learning how to break/fix computers in middle school or before
It will simply teach them how to go around those "protections". And put them at risk of using shaddy services to do so. Exactly like what happened with the war on drugs...
Hmmmmm today is a very different world compared to when we used the Internet to learn how to code. Now with Ai doing all the coding is learning how to code even happenning?
Also, just talked two friends who work for mid-size companies and last week both of their CEOs told them to just point Ai to their Jira tickets to finish all their tasks. Anyone else hearing their CEOs instruct the same thing?
This has nothing to do with that. They probably realized that teenagers are a small enough portion of their userbase that the loss of revenue (and probably lack thereof to be fair) is far outweighed by the opportunity to ask users for their ID.
- some stuff about Teams that's mostly only relevant if you're using your work email for a personal account
- minimium age 13 -> 18; add "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."
- free accounts may be terminated after 6 months of no use (previously 12 months)
- removed "If you reside in the EU, the European Commission provides for an online dispute resolution platform, which you can access here: https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr." from the dispute resolution process.
Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.
Funny that this is the only Dropbox post I've seen on HN besides infamous references to their launch post. You'd think there would be plenty of interesting improvements to make.
Having been a paid user for the last decade my current experience is just getting error messages on my phone every week that something failed to sync, and that I have to re-enter the app every ~month to disable/enable syncing for my offline files, otherwise it doesn't work. I can't remember any time I've been pleasantly surprised by any change to the service.
This leaves a lot of questions. Why are they raising the age limit? What legislation demands this? Will other services follow? And what if parents give consent? Are users on a family plan now forced to kick off their kids from the joined plan?
I heard 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
Why hasn't anyone created a windows and mac client that git pushes changes to remote after file activities of local computer, and polls remote repo every 1 minute for changes to pull? I'd gladly pay for that. :-)
Yes, brave name choice. I went to have a look and the home page is nice, well laid out, and has links to documents. Small free tier to put your feet in the shallow end, and a couple of monthly plans, one aimed at individuals and the other at orgs. Perhaps a family plan would have benefits?
Alas no linux support, not even an api to allow the use of some terminal command to get round GUI fragmentation. Searching for 'sync online storage with linux' leads to a recent redit thread and a Mint Linux forum thread.
Long time Dropbox user here. I would disagree. In my opinion they still have the best file sync platform of the big providers, easily beating onedrive and Google drive for reliability, especially with hundreds of thousands of files.
Major changes:
1. You must be 18 to use Dropbox. Previously, you had to be 13 if in the United States, or 16 if higher. Dropbox may use information "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."
2. Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months. Previously, it was 12 months.
3. If you have multiple accounts tied to the same email address, and one is banned, the others may also be banned.
4. "Refunds are only issued if required by law." -> "Refunds are only issued in limited circumstances or if required by law."
5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account. Previously, it was only if you continued to use the service.
6. Some terms covering Teams accounts.
> Your account may be terminated if you don't have a Paid account and haven't accessed for 6 months
I hope file sync is treated as "access", otherwise this would make me anxious.
> 5. You automatically agree to the new terms if you continue to have an account.
I would really love to see courts throw this BS out.
I agree with you in principle.
It would also potentially invalidate clauses like the one in GPL license too: "this version or any later version" — how can anyone consent to yet-unknown terms?
In this particular case and going after the summary from big85, there's one case of legal compliance (like age restrictions — it applies in appropriate jurisdictions even if the ToS is not updated) or maybe two (banning per-account vs per-owner), some widening of the terms to the benefit of the customer (like refunds being permitted in "special circumstances" on top of "required by law, with only "reductionist" change being about lowering service window for unused free accounts (in some jurisdictions, even this could be about respecting data privacy laws — companies are obligated to remove any data which is not used after a certain time, though I think this is 12 months even under GDPR).
As such, I believe this would not be a good case where you can bring enough light how this type of clause is harming one side to the contract.
For "this or any later version", I have always read this line as you get to choose which version you want to follow, not the one granting you the licence.
Certainly, but would that even be enforceable from a perspective of the grantee?
"Hey, I trusted FSF to do the right thing with the next version and they did not"
They blindly accepted to honor the terms which have not yet been defined.
Does this mean that young adults that work for companies that use Dropbox, cannot collaborate with others using Dropbox?
Diffchecker for the save
https://www.diffchecker.com/QD8AKShC/
Super useful. Any open source tools like this?
Amazing Dropbox went from a brilliantly simple service to this stagnating corporate swamp of ooze. Yet another fascinating example of how headcount correlates with quality decline.
The pricing got very complicated, that part is true. On the other hand, service quality didn’t go down. They added many small features which makes things easier, on the other hand.
I use a bunch of additional services they offer. They work well, make me spend less money and save my time (e.g.: send, transcription, advanced sharing controls).
I guess teenagers don't have any need to sync files, eh? Hate to see this gradual erosion of internet access for young people - I'd bet half the notable members of this very site started their career trajectory by learning how to break/fix computers in middle school or before
It will simply teach them how to go around those "protections". And put them at risk of using shaddy services to do so. Exactly like what happened with the war on drugs...
It is not about age. It is just a way to tie accounts to a real life identity.
It won't be surprising if the requirement comes from some alphabet agency.
It’s erosion of closed saas, not the internet. That already broke the hacker environments of yesteryear.
Hmmmmm today is a very different world compared to when we used the Internet to learn how to code. Now with Ai doing all the coding is learning how to code even happenning?
Also, just talked two friends who work for mid-size companies and last week both of their CEOs told them to just point Ai to their Jira tickets to finish all their tasks. Anyone else hearing their CEOs instruct the same thing?
This has nothing to do with that. They probably realized that teenagers are a small enough portion of their userbase that the loss of revenue (and probably lack thereof to be fair) is far outweighed by the opportunity to ask users for their ID.
Looks like the major changes are:
- some stuff about Teams that's mostly only relevant if you're using your work email for a personal account
- minimium age 13 -> 18; add "Dropbox may use and rely on information from third parties, including age signals from app stores, for the purpose of enforcing this restriction."
- free accounts may be terminated after 6 months of no use (previously 12 months)
- removed "If you reside in the EU, the European Commission provides for an online dispute resolution platform, which you can access here: https://ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr." from the dispute resolution process.
That last point is funny... so arbitration agreements are designed to make the process intentionally more difficult. Can't provide too many hints!
Dropbox will be one of the next Bending Spoons acquisitions. Low growth, none of the upsell or product extension things they've done have really worked out, and no-one's idea of what the future looks like.
Funny that this is the only Dropbox post I've seen on HN besides infamous references to their launch post. You'd think there would be plenty of interesting improvements to make.
Having been a paid user for the last decade my current experience is just getting error messages on my phone every week that something failed to sync, and that I have to re-enter the app every ~month to disable/enable syncing for my offline files, otherwise it doesn't work. I can't remember any time I've been pleasantly surprised by any change to the service.
This leaves a lot of questions. Why are they raising the age limit? What legislation demands this? Will other services follow? And what if parents give consent? Are users on a family plan now forced to kick off their kids from the joined plan?
I've been a happy customer of Tresorit for several years now. Give them a try if you're fed up with Dropbox.
At first I was selective in what folders I synced but after a few months I decided to just sync my entire workspace folder with everything in it.
Incredibly convenient, everything is automatically synced between my desktop and laptop.
If you go this route look into filters, it's not a very advertised feature but works great for excluding build output, venvs and other stuff.
What’s a good Dropbox alternative? Especially for Macs. Feels like they spent twenty years just making the Mac client worse.
Use maestral.app on Linux and macOS.
Also bypasses the free Dropbox account's limitations on 3 devices.
I heard 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
Self-hosted Seafile + Tailscale works great for me.
iCloud Drive is the obvious choice.
If you only have ios and mac clients why not icloud?
Why hasn't anyone created a windows and mac client that git pushes changes to remote after file activities of local computer, and polls remote repo every 1 minute for changes to pull? I'd gladly pay for that. :-)
i think that's kind of what rclone is https://github.com/rclone/rclone
haven't used it yet. i either back up my data with restic or sync it to other devices with syncthing, but those are tiny files (keepassxc dbs)
If the enshittification continues, it might be time to go back to rsync [0].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
I switched to Sync last year. Much cheaper, better quality.
I didn't know about Sync. TIL someone had the guts to start a company named "Sync" in 2011.
Yes, brave name choice. I went to have a look and the home page is nice, well laid out, and has links to documents. Small free tier to put your feet in the shallow end, and a couple of monthly plans, one aimed at individuals and the other at orgs. Perhaps a family plan would have benefits?
Alas no linux support, not even an api to allow the use of some terminal command to get round GUI fragmentation. Searching for 'sync online storage with linux' leads to a recent redit thread and a Mint Linux forum thread.
not sure if this helps: https://help.sync.com/hc/en-us/articles/55076263500051-How-t...
Let that sync in
forgot to link: https://help.sync.com/hc/en-us
Diff or it didn't happen
100%
It's 2026 and they're handling IT like pariahs of the stone age.
Even they grey beards of the 70s would have worked that out easily.
Oh it's probably intentional. I've seen efforts to simplify terms of service get rejected because "more people might read it if it's shorter".
Well, diff it then?
(I'm a former user of dropbox.)
Good services make change explicit.
Dropbox seems to have degraded into incompetence. Unable to provide good services.
Long time Dropbox user here. I would disagree. In my opinion they still have the best file sync platform of the big providers, easily beating onedrive and Google drive for reliability, especially with hundreds of thousands of files.
i'm so happy with syncthing project.
curl and ftp never refuse to work, or willfully erase your backup files on their own initiative. Just saying.
TL;DR?
- You must be 18+
- You must access Dropbox every 6 months (from 12) if you have a free to ensure they don't delete your account
I did a comparison with an LLM of my choice and there was no meaningful difference (or nothing I would consider HN-worthy).
Given the HN-worthy differences posted by others, here’s another example of why it’s not a good idea to delegate your thinking to LLMs.
I… guess? I'm not sure why this was posted. None of these changes seem important.
I saw a comment and didn’t prompt an LLM and see the whole difference: https://www.diffchecker.com/QD8AKShC/