Dropbox Launches New 'Dropbox Professional' Account Option for Freelancers

Tuesday October 17, 2017 11:11 AM PDT by Juli Clover
Dropbox today introduced a new account option called Dropbox Professional, aimed at individuals who need more storage and features than are available with a standard Plus account, but don't need a business account.

Priced at $19.99 per month, Dropbox Professional offers 1TB of storage and it includes a new feature called Dropbox Showcase.


Dropbox Showcase allows for Dropbox content to be organized into a PDF with a customized layout, visual previews, captions, and personalized branding, turning it into a portfolio of sorts.

Along with Dropbox Showcase and 1TB of storage, the new tier includes OCR and Smart Sync, a feature previously limited to Dropbox Business users. Smart Sync allows users to customize where files and folders are stored, with options for storing locally, in the cloud, or both.

With OCR or optical character recognition, Dropbox can understand the text in scanned documents, allowing for them to be searchable. The final feature available in Dropbox Showcase is an option to cause a document to remotely expire.

The introduction of Dropbox Professional comes two weeks after Dropbox introduced its revamped brand design that focuses on bright, contrasting colors, and introduces new fonts and logos to its products.

Dropbox users can sign up for Dropbox Professional starting today.

Tag: Dropbox
37 comments


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robinp
24 months ago
Their redesign still makes me want to vommit
Rating: 10 Votes
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ryanmcv
24 months ago
It's pretty clear that Dropbox doesn't want to focus on individual, non-business users. If they did, they would increase the free tier to at LEAST 15GB and offer plans at 99 cents or $2.99/month for 50 to 200GB.
Rating: 5 Votes
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BeyondtheTech
24 months ago

It's pretty clear that Dropbox doesn't want to focus on individual, non-business users. If they did, they would increase the free tier to at LEAST 15GB and offer plans at 99 cents or $2.99/month for 50 to 200GB.



I've been waiting for them to add the option to password-protect the Selective Sync option, so that way I could've shared my Dropbox space with family members and only sync the folders I specify. But that specific request kept falling on deaf ears, and this is what they do instead.

Now that iCloud Storage offers 2TB for $9.99/month, and shareable with family members, I'm glad I let my Dropbox subscription run out.
Rating: 4 Votes
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ArtOfWarfare
24 months ago
Interesting that, according to Dropbox, 1 TB = 1000 GB, but 2 TB = 2048 GB.
Rating: 3 Votes
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nutmac
24 months ago
$19.99/month for the same storage capacity as $9.99/month plan? Some of the "Professional" features seem interesting, but Dropbox could've at least doubled the storage space also.
Rating: 3 Votes
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CarlJ
24 months ago

I don’t understand what Dropbox is doing. Where is the 500GB $4.99 tier???

In the early days, when I was participating in their forum and avidly awaiting new releases, a lot of us were clamoring, "we love your free product, we want you to stay around, and we'd like more space, how about 20 or 50 GB for $2-$5/mo". They came out with professional and business services at notably higher prices and ignored our pleas. I won a number of treasure hunt-type contests they had early on that gave additional free space, and got various referrals, and now I have enough free space that it's not a limiting factor, plus lots of other (usually less well implemented) cloud storage services have arrived. I wish that they had taken us up on having a lower-end plan, I think they could have gotten much more market penetration than the path they chose.
Rating: 2 Votes
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GaymerAdam
24 months ago
I don't understand why you would use Dropbox. Office 365 works out at less than £5 per month (if you by 1yr in a box in a retail store, on an offer which is always on). For that you get 5TB storage (1TB each for 5 accounts), the full MS Office suite for 5 people, Skype minutes, free software upgrades etc etc... All these Dropbox "features" just dont seem worth the enormous increase in cost in comparison.
Rating: 2 Votes
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coolfactor
24 months ago

It's pretty clear that Dropbox doesn't want to focus on individual, non-business users. If they did, they would increase the free tier to at LEAST 15GB and offer plans at 99 cents or $2.99/month for 50 to 200GB.


Hard to agree with this viewpoint. I currently pay $9.99 + $3.99 (for unlimited history), and I have 1TB of space in my account, mainly due to referring the service to friends and colleagues, getting bonus space.

Ultimately, Dropbox is a business and needs to make money. I think it's unreasonable to expect gigabytes of server storage space for such a small amount of money (eg. 50GB for $12 per year?.... a single fast-food meal could easily cost more than that!). We are lucky that they've offered an ad-free "Free" tier for so long.
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Has G Suite fixed Google Drive? I haven't used it since 2014, but back then, it was an unintuitive and glitched-up mess. Dropbox has been great for me; I signed up when they were pretty much brand new (late 2007) and still use it.

Gmail and Google Docs, though... That's nice to have.


It is better these days, but still not *as* good as Dropbox in terms of the different types of files that it can handle. I think that's the differentiating feature.... they have different features and capabilities. Dropbox works better for me with its pure filesystem integration, supporting any type of file seamlessly.
Rating: 2 Votes
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techpr
24 months ago
I don’t understand what Dropbox is doing. Where is the 500GB $4.99 tier???
Rating: 2 Votes
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Escape Velocity
24 months ago
I don't understand paying for a 1TB Dropbox.

1TB Dropbox: $99/year

1TB OneDrive AND a subscription to Office 365 on up to 5 computers: $99/year

The value comparison seems pretty clear.
Rating: 2 Votes
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