Dropbox blames crypto miners and resellers for ending its unlimited cloud storage plan

Dropbox said in a blog post that it’s implementing a metered model on its Advanced plan in response to customers who have been using Dropbox for cryptocurrency mining, “pooling storage for personal use cases,” and others reselling it.

Because of that, Dropbox is getting rid of its “as much space as you need” offer. Customers who sign up for a Dropbox Advanced plan with three active licenses will instead receive 15TB of storage across their whole team. As for businesses currently on the plan, the company says those using less than 35TB of storage will get to keep that amount, “plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage, for five years at no additional charge to their existing plan.”

Dropbox will throw in an additional 5TB of storage for each extra active license. Meanwhile, the company says it’s “committed” to working with businesses using over 35TB, noting it’ll allow users to keep using their storage amount “at the time you’re notified, plus an additional 5TB credit of pooled storage for one year” at no extra charge. Dropbox will contact these businesses to “discuss a range” of alternate storage options.

“Our policy for Advanced has always been to provide as much storage as needed to run a legitimate business or organization, not to provide unlimited storage for any use case,” Dropbox writes. Dropbox says customers misusing the unlimited offer “consume thousands of times more storage” than the businesses using the platform as intended, but creating use policies that worked at scale or trying to enforce them just wouldn’t work.

Dropbox’s Advanced plan is the company’s most expensive (outside of its Enterprise offering), costing $30 per user / month. The service’s new policy goes into effect on November 1st.