Buy, neglect, abandon: FormSwift and DocSend wound down after $260M in deals

Dropbox spent heavily to expand beyond storage. In 2021 it acquired DocSend, a secure document-sharing and analytics startup, for about $165 million in cash, and in December 2022 it acquired FormSwift, a forms and document-template platform, for about $95 million — roughly $260 million across the two deals, alongside other purchases such as the universal-search startup Command E.

Within a few years, much of that investment was being unwound. In March 2025 Dropbox discontinued the DocSend-derived 'Send & Track' feature, removing the document-tracking analytics that were DocSend's core value — leaving users able to share files but not see who opened them or how they engaged. Dropbox also sharply reduced its investment in FormSwift at the start of 2025 and moved to wind the product down, with related Dropbox Forms functionality slated for discontinuation in 2025 and the broader wind-down extending into 2026; Dropbox's Q3 2026 earnings release says it "completed the wind down of operations" for the quarter ended September 30, 2026. Management acknowledged the FormSwift wind-down as a meaningful headwind to revenue and paying-user counts.

The pattern — acquire a product, under-invest in integrating it, then shut it down — meant customers who adopted these tools through Dropbox lost them, and the capital spent acquiring them produced little durable value. Meanwhile critics argued the same money and attention might have strengthened Dropbox's core file-sync-and-share product, which was itself losing paying users.