Dropbox drops its unlimited storage offer, blaming crypto-cloud miners

Storage platform turned to metered storage after discovering its Advanced plan was being used by some for crypto mining and other resource-intensive tasks.

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Online storage platform Dropbox has removed its unlimited storage plan after discovering that some of its users were using the service for resource-intensive purposes, such as cryptocurrency mining.

In an August 24 blog post, Dropbox said its Advanced Unlimited plan has now moved to a limited storage plan, with new users getting 15 terabytes of storage, apparently enough to house 100 million documents.

He added that he knew his "all the space you need" plan would lead to uneven usage levels, but over the past few months he's seen an increase in users consuming " thousands of times more storage than our real business customers.

“A growing number of customers were purchasing Advanced subscriptions not to run a business or organization, but rather for purposes such as crypto and Chia mining. »

Dropbox said other resource-intensive uses include reselling its storage space or having multiple people pool storage space for personal use.

Screenshot of the previous plan showing the storage as "As much space as needed. Source: CBackup

Dropbox cited unintended usage growth following "other services making similar policy changes" Microsoft and Google also dropped their unlimited storage plans in recent months.

The company said it understood the decision was “disappointing,” but added that it would be unsustainable and difficult to enforce a list of unacceptable use cases.

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