Dropbox For Education Is Good For Schools, But Not Individuals

Dropbox is perhaps one of the most well-known cloud storage services out there. They offer users 2GB of free storage space, with the option to increase that by recruiting friends and completing other tasks. While they have offered Pro and Business plans for their users, the educational field has been left out of their plans. But today's announcement will hopefully make sharing files a bit easier for some educational establishments.

Dropbox for Education is a very similar offering to what the company provides for businesses. The pricing structure is a little different, though. The new Education package has a price of $49 per user, per year, with a minimum of 300 users. Each user gets 15 GB of space, which can be pooled together for a total of 4.5 TB.

Compare that to the Dropbox Business pricing, which $12.50 per user, per month, with a minimum of 5 users. Business accounts also have unlimited storage. So in essence, the Education version costs about 1/3 of the Business account, with the limitations of 15GB of space per user, and a very high minimum user count.

Dropbox promises many of the same security features that the Business side gets, as well. You'll get one central Admin Console, which can be used to manage users, monitor activity, and setup permissions. Users will be able to share files with any other Dropbox users, so long as the Admin hasn't restricted file sharing. The new Education package is currently available today, for educators who want a better way for their students to share and collaborate.

I still think it would be nice if Dropbox offered a special rate for students and teachers, for individual accounts. While this new Educational plan might be nice for some places, it's still a large cost, and doesn't help out individual students, if their school hasn't signed up for this program.

Source: Dropbox