The 2019 Plus repackaging: a 20% price increase dressed up as 'more storage'
May 2019
In May 2019 Dropbox doubled the Plus plan's storage from 1TB to 2TB but raised the price from $10 to $12 per month, bundling in features many individual users did not want and giving them no way to keep the cheaper, smaller plan.
What happened
On 29 May 2019 Dropbox overhauled its flagship individual plan, Dropbox Plus. The company doubled the included storage from 1TB to 2TB and folded in features such as Rewind (rolling back a whole account to an earlier point) and the previously higher-tier Smart Sync. At the same time it raised the price: Plus went "from $10 per month to $12 per month," as VentureBeat reported, with the new pricing taking effect immediately for new subscribers.
The framing was 'more for more' — extra storage and tools to justify the higher bill. But for the large share of Plus subscribers who were nowhere near filling 1TB, the change was simply a roughly 20% price increase for capacity and features they had not asked for. Dropbox offered no option to keep the old 1TB plan at the old price; existing subscribers kept the old price only until the end of their current billing cycle and were charged the new price from the next one.
The repackaging fit a recurring tactic in subscription businesses: raise the entry price while attaching a headline benefit, so the increase reads as added value rather than a hike. For users who chose Dropbox precisely because its single, simple paid tier was easy to reason about, the change removed the cheaper option entirely.
Impact
The 2019 increase was the clearest example of Dropbox raising the cost of its core consumer plan by bundling in capacity most subscribers would never use. It removed the lower-priced tier that had anchored Dropbox's individual offering for years, pushing every Plus customer up the price curve regardless of need, and it set the pattern of 'storage you can't decline' that would recur as the company leaned harder on subscription revenue after its IPO.