The cheapest way to learn in SaaS is probably to buy the product and see what they're doing.
Dropbox Revenue
From a numbers standpoint, Dropbox has 700M users, of which are 18.16M are paying customers (around 2.5% of all users). 2.5% is a high enough number for a PLG company.
They grew revenue by 7% (~180M) in 2023.
The first quarter of 2024 saw slower growth in terms of revenue though.
To learn from Dropbox, all I needed to do was pay $30 and see everything I could as without having to join the team. What a steal.
I gathered 130+ screenshots across their entire app, and labelled a lot of stuff 🥵
The company I work for has a paid plan with Dropbox so I know that creatives are their most important target audience.
Creatives have a few challenges. They work with very heavy files and must keep them organized. They also work with clients and have an approval process.
Every product that Dropbox built was about virality. Choosing creatives as an ICP also has virality baked in if you think about it. More on that to come in a different blog post.
Homepage
The homepage is focused on conversions. You see ‘Find your Plan” at the top. The secondary CTA is sign up for free.
The fifth fold prioritizes work use case over personal in the visual hierarchy. Forces people in the Systems 1 thinking by giving two options instead of just one.
The footer also focuses on the "Get your plan" CTA
Idea💡 Direct people to the pricing page from the homepage where they can get a free trial
Activation
The first modal window I see in the onboarding asks me to upload a file and share it.
When I try to share it, I see a paywall.
This is brilliant!
First, the feature is optimized for shareability. Dropbox stands to gain from this.
Second, they show me a nice feature (password to a file).
The share button is disabled. The feature is highlighted in blue to draw attention.
If I didn't want to pay I could click on the "Create and copy link" text, and it would still work.
Idea💡 The first feature you introduce to can lead them to a shareable feature. When you introduce a paywall, you might want to let people opt-in for a trial.
Buying a plan
When I click on "Buy essentials", I'm not taken to the pricing page but rather led to their plan directly.
Yearly is selected by default for obvious reasons. The one odd thing is that I can't start a trial. It was available on the public facing pricing page.
I signed up with multiple accounts. So, here's another thing that Dropbox is testing.
Dropbox will also ask you in the onboarding itself which plan would you like to choose. You can see that the free plan is almost hidden below the fold. They also offer to remind me when I have a few days left before my trial (but I didn't really read that copy).
Different layouts for the same plan
I installed the desktop app and haven't upgraded yet.
On the final screen of the onboarding, it tries to sell me into the "Plus" plan. Again, it doesn't mention I could start a free trial on the CTA.
Anyway, the imagery is great! It compares the free vs the paid plan.
Although, 2 GB on the free plan is 0.1% the size of the paid plan limit. Not 33% that this visual demonstrates.
Tip 💡 Compare the free plan vs paid plan visually. Might need an art director.
Now, this is interesting. You saw earlier with the Essentials plan, I never saw Dropbox Plus. But now I do.
Plus comes with no free trial, since it's a cheaper plan.
I also got a little confused with their naming. How was Essentials more expensive than Plus? All prices uses 1 and 9 so it got even more confusing.
There are a host of clever things Dropbox does
Showing how close am I to the plan limit (Using 39KB of 2TB) with a progress bar
No free trial vs free trial
Show both monthly and yearly plans at once, and calculated in both frequencies
Look at the differences, even in the features shown on the side.
Dropbox lets you bypass their free trial. It's a good anchor to the free trial.
You can request an invoice too. Manages expectation that it needs to be a larger order (team of 15+)
They offer multiple payment providers (although some may not work well).
Dropbox doesn't let me abandon the purchase flow. Once I clicked on the upgrade option via the onboarding flow in the desktop app, it doesn't let me simply abandon it.
Lifecycle Emails
Dropbox emails are very inspiring. They have the perfect email previews, use lots of liquid and HTML, is super on-brand, ties every email to their core action metric, and use proper sub-domains for sending so it never hurts deliverability. There's a lot to like!
Email 1
Email 2
Upsells
Dropbox does a great job at upselling me into a plan. In the UI, you'll see "Invite Team Members" plastered at nearly three different places. If you were to click on it, you'd see this modal that asks you to upgrade into Dropbox Business.
So, essentially I was upsold while I was in the middle of a trial. And I can't purchase just one more seat, so I need to purchase a minimum of three seats.
Once you upgrade to business use cases, the invite flow is also incredible. Your team members are assigned tasks by you. Two are selected by default. One of the tasks is to upload their personal folder. The more team members upload their personal folder, the more likely will you hit those storage limits if any.
Another cool thing Dropbox does, it it will ask all your team members to invite more team members in the onboarding itself. They customize the reasons for inviting differently for team members vs admin. Admin might care about security but team members might care about other things.
I'll talk more about their invite flow in another blog post. It's extensive!
If I were to get a trial on the business tier, it wouldn't give the bare minimum of 3 licenses but rather give me five.
Feature Discoverability
A big reason why people pay is how deeply you are integrated with their workflow. Many users might churn stating that they left because a feature wasn't available. When, you probably had that feature and they couldn't discover it.
The beautiful thing about software is that people pay when they receive value and stop paying when they don't. Feature discoverability plays a strong role in making the first part of it happen.
The coolest thing that Dropbox does is that each product has their own tutorial/onboarding.
Dropbox's Replay had the best onboarding of all times. My mind was blown.
You can watch it here. Can't embed it unfortunately, no idea why not.
They also added a PDF file because one of the features was to "Send and Track" files.
This PDF would come in handy as I discovered another feature of theirs, hidden under their most used button.
My first thought when I saw this was, "Huh!? You can edit PDFs these days? Wow". This is probably so useful.
The thing about feature discoverability is that people might not even know what they need until you show it to them. And Dropbox introduced me to 10s of features in a matter of a few minutes without being intrusive.
Such as this one: "you can convert file formats with Dropbox!?"
Sometimes, it would trigger the good old modal window when I opened up a new product.
Other times, it would highlight the button enticing you to click on it. When I uploaded a file, it automatically opens up in the sidebar and the first thing I saw was this share button. And it doesn't stop there. Dropdown gives you reasons why you might want to share.
In-product onboarding is more natural. They open up a feature I haven't yet explored. If they detect that I have explored a feature, it won't open up.
This button on the main dashboard keeps changing based on which feature I might have not explored yet.
When to monetize
They monetize the number of templates, and it is not just 1-2 but a healthy limit of 15. Perhaps, it triggers a sales conversation.
A niche little feature that lets you compare versions, is an add-on.
Btw, the upsell you see in a feature disappears after the first click. So, they don't continuously spam the user. And also open up room for few features.
Contact sales is not visible on the cheapest tier. I saw a popup only when I hit the business tier.
Failed Payments
When you login, this is the modal window it’ll show to you.
You see this banner with a countdown at all times. Plus a "Add billing details" as a CTA that replaces the upgrade button.
Thanks for reading, I'm going to improve this article in the next couple of months. There's a lot to learn!