The 2023 walk-back: Dropbox ends the 'as much space as you need' Advanced plan

For years Dropbox marketed its top business tier, Dropbox Advanced, around an explicit promise: teams could get 'as much space as you need.' On 24 August 2023 the company retired that promise. Going forward, an Advanced plan with three active licenses would include 15TB of pooled storage, with each additional license adding 5TB, and a hard cap of 1,000TB — a fully metered model with paid add-ons priced at roughly $10 per terabyte per month.

Dropbox said the change was forced by abuse: a growing number of customers, it claimed, were buying Advanced subscriptions not to run a business but for purposes like crypto and Chia mining, pooling storage among unrelated individuals, or reselling the storage outright. The company argued that policing such use case by case had become unsustainable, and that a few customers were consuming thousands of times more storage than genuine business customers.

Dropbox cushioned the move for existing subscribers — saying over 99% of Advanced customers, those using under 35TB per license, could keep their current usage plus a 5TB credit for five years at no extra charge, while the heaviest users got one year before negotiations. But the underlying reversal stood: a feature sold as unlimited was now capped, and customers who had chosen Dropbox specifically for that promise had to re-plan around metered pricing.

The transition was staged. Dropbox's blog post said it would "begin gradually migrating existing customers to the new policy on November 1" and would "notify all customers at least 30 days prior to their planned migration date." It said customers using less than 35TB per license could keep the storage their team was using "at the time they’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage, for five years at no additional charge," and that customers at 35TB or more per license could do so "for one year (up to 1,000TB total)." The post does not say when the five years start. If counted from a notice sent in late 2023, the credit would end in roughly late 2028; that is this archive's calculation under that assumption, not a date Dropbox has published. The ongoing status of this entry reflects that, on that calculation, the five-year credits have not yet expired.

A December 2025 post on Dropbox's community forum shows the later end of this history for one user. The user wrote that they had about 50TB on the former unlimited Advanced plan, that they had asked Dropbox support what would happen to their data if they did not continue a paid plan, and that support had told them it would remain while the account stayed active, with a higher-level reconfirmation they dated to March 2024. They wrote that they were notified in November that their data would be deleted by 30 January 2026 unless usage was brought under 2GB, and that this contradicted those assurances. This is one user's account, it is an allegation, and this archive has not verified it. A Dropbox community-team reply posted on 19 December 2025 said: "The information that you were previously provided was accurate at that time. However, our policies may change from time to time," and "Dropbox subsequently began enforcing quota limits for our free tier (Dropbox Basic). For Basic users, files may be deleted until they are under quota." A community manager wrote on 9 February 2026 that the issue had been escalated, and the thread was then closed; the thread, as captured, records no outcome.