Although Dropbox is a fairly simple service to use for most cloud storage needs, it faces stiff competition from the likes of Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, Box, and more, especially on the pricing front. For example, the Dropbox Plus plan for individual use starts at $12/month with 2TB of storage, which is considerably more expensive than the Microsoft 365 Basic plan which starts at $2/month with just 100GB but also bundles goodies such as seamless integration with Office apps. Now, Dropbox has decided to restrict its unlimited storage policy due to malicious behavior from some of its customers.

Dropbox currently offers an "Advanced" plan geared towards businesses at $30/user/month. It offers numerous features which enterprise customers might find useful, such as security monitoring, notifications, alerts, data classification, and more. However, it's headlining feature was that it gave access to unlimited storage space, regardless of an organization's usage.

Over time, Dropbox has learned that some of its customers have been misusing this plan by leveraging it for cryptomining, personal use, and reselling storage space to other people. This wasn't resulting in a sustainable business model for Dropbox and was also violating the intended use of the plan, and as such, the company has now decided to end its "as much space as you need" policy in favor of a more restrictive approach.

Starting today, the Dropbox Advanced Plan with three active licenses will grant access to 15TB of storage space shared by the whole team. To put this into perspective, this is enough to store 7,500 hours of HD videos or about 100 million documents, according to Dropbox. Each time a license is added to this plan, an additional 5TB will be made available on top of the original 15TB, up to a cap of 1000TB.

Dropbox has acknowledged that this significant change may disrupt some legitimate businesses, so it is giving some leeway to its customers. Those who use less than 35TB of storage will be allowed to continue using their storage consumed at the time of being directly notified about the change, and they will also be awarded an extra 5TB of storage for the next five years. Meanwhile, the <1% of its user base which leverages more than 35TB of storage will be given the same conditions, but its 5TB of extra storage will be valid for one year only. Dropbox will also reach out to such customers to offer them additional plans to meet their cloud storage needs.

Speaking of cloud storage needs, add-ons will become available at $10/TB/month ($8/TB/month if billed annually) for new and existing customers from September 18 and November 1 respectively. In the same vein, a gradual migration process to the new policy for existing customers will kick off on November 1, and they will be notified 30 days prior to their planned migration. As such, no action is required from anyone right now.

Dropbox says that these changes are necessary in order to curb abuse from malicious actors and also because it's not feasible to keep updating its acceptable use-cases list and apply it in a scalable manner. It has emphasized that these changes will result in a better and more reliable experience for legitimate businesses, which is the sole target market for the Dropbox Advanced plan.