It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service.

(at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

> I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space.

There used to be many more - Sugarsync, AeroFS, Syncplicity, just to name a few - all bit the dust. Box.com found a niche serving business document flows; Gdrive, iCloud, OneDrive, all survived thanks to being features in a broader Big Tech suite. Everybody else? Outcompeted, plain and simple. Dropbox was just a cut above.

(I used to work at one of the companies named above, so although it's just one person's opinion, it's at least as informed as anyone else's here :) )

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions.

I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.

> Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it [..]

Why not keep using B2? You didn't mention why you were leaving that platform when it seems like a decent solution to your problem.

How much are you willing to pay for this service? Ballpark. And what is your ratio of data at rest vs data you want shared? Are you ok with your permanent copy being local?

It's a surprisingly tricky problem. I know all too well.

If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.

> With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated

Good pun!

>With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with.

Business Strategy 101 teaches that broadly speaking, there are 3 categories into which companies fall, which are cost leadership, differentiation, or segment focus.

If, as you say, your only pain point is the cost of dropbox, then any potential alternative would be competing to be the cost leader, and cost leadership strategies are unattractive for startups. Nobody is investing in early-stage companies building "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's hard to attract startup talent to "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's rarely fun for founders to build "a cheaper clone of XYZ".

Unfortunately I think there are limited avenues for successful differentiation in the file sync space. Self-hosted vs cloud, standalone vs OS-level integration, cross-platform vs not? Can't think of much else off the top of my head, and I think big players are able to throw shitloads of engineering talent at OS-level integration features (and that gets you iCloud, basically).

Beating dropbox at their own game wouldn't be impossible, but I think that's why there aren't many competitors in that space.

You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.