Came here to say pretty much the same thing. It's slick and easy to use. It's actually the 'dropbox' I've always wanted and if they introduce a storage limit I'd pay.
What's also impressive is doing away with Dropbox's clunky "selective sync". While having everything stored locally sounds like a good idea at first, as you store more and more data is gets less and less user-friendly; in other words, power-users get the worst user experience.
Additionally, creating an easy way to share files with friends without taking up their quota is awesome. This looks like it could be a very, very powerful competitor to Dropbox.
Not storing files locally sounds like a good idea at first - you don't have any syncing issues. But nobody has a perfect always-on internet connection. Having files local is worth the occasional sync cockup.
Oh for sure there's a reason that approach is dropbox's default - its really hard for people to understand their files aren't really "there".
That said, my point is more that for people who start storing 100GB+ of data, it becomes harder and harder to actually manage which bits you want at any time.
>There is no paid upgrade currently. The 10GB free accounts will stay free, but we'll likely offer paid storage for people who want to store more data.
Dropbox works with the NSA to hand over customer data. You are absolutely right that something like this would go over like a turd in a punchbowl at Dropbox HQ.
Unlike Google, Microsoft and Slack, Dropbox does have the top, 5 star, EFF rating for protecting your data from the government... I'm not sure what more they could be doing.
Their profitability depends on being able to dedupe and compress data across all customers. They would need to raise prices significantly to make client side encryption a built in feature.
Then use tarsnap already. Bonus: it is owned by our own cperciva.
tarsnap is nerdish, secure and reasonably priced for what it provides IIRC. Haven't used it though but expect someone would have yelled out here if it was bad. (In fact the only one I've seen bashing it was patio11, -because it was too cheap and too nerdish.)
https://keybase.io/jgrahamc