My university recently reached the next level in Dropbox’s Space Race, a competition that aims to refer Dropbox to classmates in order to get increased space. Thanks to my university’s great amount of referrals I know have 8 GB. Dropbox have been the only online cloud storage service for me since I first got introduced to the concept. It was not until Google introduced Google Drive that I started to reflect and further look into the alternative free cloud store services that are out there, and I discovered several services offering the same amount of space, or more, and that are seen to be better than Dropbox. Examples are Sugar Sync, File Savr, Glide and Google Drive. Glide having the impressing amount of 30GB available free.

I find it interesting that I always have had Dropbox without even considering looking into alternatives, which leads to the next question – how do they work to attract new and keep current customers? The two obvious and crucial factors are space vs. price. Dropbox was successful in managing the freemium model (basic features free, pay to get further benefits) in a time where there where not much competition. However, today there are a vast variety of different similar services, offering higher space limit than Dropbox without extra charge (e.g. Glide). Even among the most known services that aims at the consumer and home user (Google Drive, iCloud, and Microsofts SkyDrive) Dropbox is offering the least amount of space, 2GB. Dropbox’s Space Race is a sign that Dropbox feels threatened, and the competition makes the service superior in free space over Google Drive, iCloud, Sugar sync and SkyDrive. It is important to remember that Dropbox is a very strong brand, but so is Google which additionally offers popular connecting features as e.g. Google Docs, that ads value to its cloud service. Thanks to the success in the competition I have decided to stay with Dropbox for time being, but more and more of my files are added to Google drive. I’m looking forward in following the development of free online cloud services and see if for how long the companies will be able to charge for x amount of space.