Droplr to drop always-free file-sharing accounts

Droplr will stop offering free accounts for its file-sharing service, the company’s founders wrote yesterday in a blog post. The move further differentiates the startup from better-known file sharing companies, such as Box and Dropbox, and suggests the company really wants to bring in revenue.

“Next week we will release some exciting new features to Droplr that we’ve been working on for a long time … At that time, we will be discontinuing our free accounts,” cofounders Josh Bryant and Levi Nunnink wrote in the post. Current free users and new users will be able to use the premium Droplr service for 30 days, after which they will be asked to start paying. (Hat tip to The Next Web for writing about the post.)

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Those who decline to pull out their credit cards will no longer be able to upload files to the service. Existing files won’t be deleted, and existing links to the files will continue to work, Bryant and Nunnink wrote.

Droplr’s investors should be happy to see the Oregon-based startup stepping up its monetization strategy. It reported more than $478,000 in seed funding in September, with an investment from newly formed Seven Peaks Ventures.

Droplr aims to keep its user experience super simple by providing links to files that users can share any way they want.

While anyone can use Droplr, the company has been expending resources to become more useful to businesses. It already provides “business” and “enterprise” options. The latter allows for unlimited storage.

New features for businesses are on the way, according to the new blog post. For one thing, businesses and other paid users will be able to store as many files as they want without worrying about how much virtual space it takes up.

“We’ll be removing all of our storage limits and moving all accounts to ‘unlimited,'” Bryant told VentureBeat by email.

Even if Droplr’s investors want to give the startup a long runway to become a major file-storage vendor, the company needs to keep growing in order to stay competitive.

Dropbox and Box are both in a position to go public this year. Meanwhile, Salesforce.com raised its file-sharing profile in September by announcing Salesforce Files. And on-premises-plus-cloud file-storage vendor Egnyte recently secured a healthy $29.5 million in funding.

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