Dropbox launches Education offering, costs $49 per user per year

Cloud file syncing and sharing service Dropbox today is announcing the launch of Dropbox Education, a version of the service tailored to educational institutions. The offering is similar to the Dropbox Business tier of service in many respects, although there are a few differences.

Dropbox Education will cost $49 per user per year, and volume discounts are available, Dropbox Education director of education Jason Katcher wrote in a blog post. Dropbox Business, meanwhile, costs $15 per user per month, or approximately $150 per year. But whereas Dropbox Business offers unlimited storage, Dropbox Education comes with 15GB of storage per person that can be pooled together.

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Both Dropbox Education and Dropbox Business come with sharing permissions for admins. Both have unlimited version history, too, but with the Education package it’s only available for a year.

This type of maneuver is unusual for Dropbox. It has previously pointed users to the Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers, but not offered solutions for individual industries with special prices. It has made concessions to ensure compatibility in the past, however, such as becoming compliant with HIPAA and HITECH laws for health care and launching a page on its website that’s relevant to media organizations.

Box, by contrast, has been building industry-specific packages for years; last week it announced Box for Government.

Dropbox Business has more than 150,000 paying customers, including several colleges and universities, like the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the alma mater of Dropbox founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi), University College London, and the Teachers College at Columbia University.

In all, more than 4,000 educational organizations use Dropbox, Katcher wrote. With this new industry-specific push, and with the help of partners Ingram Micro and Synnex, that number will only go up.