Dropbox: business version and new API

Dropbox has unveiled its business offering, Dropbox for Teams, which gives you "as much storage as you need" and works on a per-user model. Business users pay $795 per year for five users, and can buy additional users for $125 each.

As a guide, the five-user account comes with 1000GB, and additional users bring 200GB. If you need more than this it is provided for free "where reasonable".

Dropbox spokespeople Sujay Jaswa and ChenLi Wang told us that they see their service as a "connective tissue" that exists between all our various devices, and that they created Dropbox for Teams to help businesses avoid complicated expenses conundrums as employees made individual claims for what they'd spent on Dropbox.

Jaswa also flagged up last week's relaunch of the Dropbox API, which you can access on the developer site.

"Our API provides the easiest and most robust way to write files across all the operating systems we support: Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, BlackBerry, Android. So for developers, that means online storage with cross-platform support and simple sharing for files and folders with file versioning. So this will dramatically reduce costs for developers who provide storage for their apps.

"Until last Friday we only had a global API, but this version includes a web API as well as loads of tutorials, and SDKs for Python, Ruby, Java.

"We're only just starting out with it, and we think that any developer that requires users to store or share data will want to take advantage of our API. For example, you might see news applications having a Dropbox button to save that article. That's the kind of thing we want to enable."

Dropbox's user base has grown extremely quickly of late. Just six months ago they had 25 million users, which has grown to 45million today. The service has been relatively free of competitors until Apple's recent unveiling of iCloud, which provides similar functionality and will inevitably take a sizeable chunk of the market.

In answer to this, Dropbox has struck a deal with HTC which gives all Sense 3.5 users a 5GB Dropbox instead of the standard 2GB. It will come pre-installed on all new HTC phones so that Android users don't miss out on the convenience of integrated cloud storage.