Issues Database

After years of advertising Dropbox Advanced as offering 'as much space as you need,' Dropbox replaced unlimited storage with metered tiers in August 2023, blaming a small group of heavy users including crypto miners and storage resellers.

A new Dropbox app starts in development status capped at 500 linked users, and once it reaches 50 users the developer has just two weeks to apply for and receive production approval — otherwise the app is frozen and cannot link any new users.

Dropbox promises a one-business-day email response on paid plans, but users widely report tickets sitting for days, being marked 'solved' without a fix, or being told to use the volunteer community forum — with some getting traction only after filing a BBB complaint.

Dropbox enforces rate limits it does not publish, returning HTTP 429 errors — including a separate too_many_write_operations limit triggered by parallel writes to the same folder — that can throttle backup tools and bulk integrations without warning.

Dropbox sends one-time verification codes for new-device or unusual logins, but when the code goes to an outdated phone number or an inbox the user can no longer reach, legitimate owners report being unable to sign in — and the questionnaire-based recovery often fails.

Dropbox made remote work a permanent default in 2020 and marketed 'Virtual First' as a model employer policy — but the lived reality of converted offices, evolving expectations, and culture-by-Slack drew its own employee friction.

Dropbox acquired key assets of Boxcryptor, the zero-knowledge encryption tool many used to protect files on Dropbox — and Boxcryptor stopped taking new users and cancelled free accounts, pushing existing users to migrate.

Apple's deprecation of kernel extensions forced Dropbox to rebuild its macOS sync on Apple's File Provider framework; macOS 12.3 (2022) removed the kext support Dropbox's online-only files relied on, changing behavior and temporarily breaking how third-party apps opened online-only files.

Dropbox's Smart Sync depended on a macOS kernel extension to present space-saving 'online-only' placeholder files; when Apple deprecated third-party kexts in macOS 12.3, opening those online-only files could break until Dropbox re-engineered the feature.

Dropbox spent $165 million on DocSend in 2021 and $95 million on FormSwift in 2022, promising to weave them into an 'end-to-end agreement workflow' — continuing its pattern of acquiring standalone tools whose long-term integration and survival under Dropbox is uncertain.

Datanet LLC sued Dropbox in October 2022 over two patents on automatic real-time file management; Dropbox challenged the patents at the patent office, and the district-court docket closed in March 2024.

Dropbox Sign (formerly HelloSign) is sold as a wholly separate subscription — a free tier capped at three documents per month, then Essentials at about $15, Standard at about $25, and Premium at roughly $40 per user per month — so existing Dropbox storage customers must pay again, per seat, to sign documents.