Quitting Dropbox, different treatment

After many years of usage, the time has come to move on from Dropbox. A once frequently used service to collaborate with classmates, now mostly used to host stale files backups and memories from university. With a new Proton duo account set up and with the files migrated, the time had come for me and my wife to cancel our Dropbox plans for renewal. We clicked the same button in the user interface, but got two completely different experiences.

A little bit of nostalgia hits me while remembering the collaboration on school projects before Dropbox, e-mail, USB memories and hosting FTP servers in the wardrobe. Then the transition to synced folders as Dropbox conveniently arrived at the beginning of my university studies.

On Windows

Quitting from Windows, my wives experience was page after page with repeated confirmations that she really wanted to quit. The pages used all the various tricks of making the button to “quit service” less obvious than the “take me back to Dropbox” button, like a 50 % smaller button or just a text link without the button graphics. We both laughed at the experience as there were at least four pages that she had to go through and at the end there were a “one time offer, 50% off” promotion.

On macOS

Quitting from macOS, I clicked the button and expected the same series of pages. But I just got one page where I needed to confirm that I wanted to cancel the service. That page showed me how much I would save with Dropbox compared to getting a list of features from different vendors; it almost felt like advertising for competitors. Not one of the features was something I had ever used at Dropbox. The overall process was quick, smooth and not laughable. Not even a “please come back” promo code at the end.

Aftermath

In the end we both managed to quit the service, it was just clicking in both cases. But the different experiences stuck with me.

I know, pictures or it did not happen. But the thought never occurred during the first part of the experience that something would be worth documenting.

I really can’t see any big difference other than the OS, potentially that I have some months instead of weeks until the renewal date. We have both had Dropbox since the start. We have both the same plan that we have paid for the last ten years, a similar amount of data in our boxes. Both been pretty inactive the last years. All in all, an interesting glimpse into how different big corporations might treat customers depending on something, whether it’d be the operating system or something else.