BetterFileTransfer vs Dropbox Transfer
Dropbox Transfer is a good send button attached to a storage product. That is its strength if you already pay for Dropbox, and its whole cost if you do not.
At a glance
Limits and prices are set by each service and change without telling us, and a figure we could not confirm reads "not confirmed" rather than being estimated. If something here is out of date or simply wrong, email contact@betterfiletransfer.com and we will correct the row. Say where you saw it and we will check it against their own pages the same way we checked the rest.
Dropbox Transfer is the part of Dropbox that behaves like a transfer service: you pick files, you get a link, the link expires. It is a genuinely well-made version of that, and it is not a separate product you can buy on its own without going looking for it.
The distinction matters, because it decides everything else. Dropbox is a place files live. A transfer is a file that leaves. We wrote about why the two verbs pull in different directions, and Dropbox Transfer is the clearest example of a storage company answering the second question well without changing the first.
What Dropbox Transfer does well
The sizes are serious. Free accounts get 2 GB per transfer, Plus and Family 50 GB, and most of the business tiers 100 GB, rising to 250 GB on Business Plus and Enterprise. If you are already paying for Dropbox, that 100 GB is included rather than an upsell.
Expiry is sensible too: seven days by default on consumer plans, thirty on the business ones, adjustable up to a year. And because the file is already in Dropbox, sending it is not a second upload. That is a real advantage nothing on this page can match for files that were going to live there anyway.
Where the two differ
- You need an account. Always. There is no anonymous send. A first-time visitor cannot use it at all, which is the single largest practical difference between the two.
- Password protection is a business feature. Not on Basic, not on Plus, not on Family. If you are on a consumer Dropbox plan, a Transfer link is protected by being unguessable and by nothing else.
- The free tier is small. 2 GB per transfer, out of 2 GB of total account storage, so a large send competes with everything else you keep there.
- Storage is the product you are buying. The cheapest Plus plan is around ten dollars a month for 2 TB. If you want 2 TB, that is good value. If you want to send a 4 GB video once a fortnight, you are renting a warehouse to post a parcel.
The encryption question
Dropbox encrypts files at rest with AES-256 and in transit with TLS, and manages the keys itself. Dropbox says so plainly, and to their credit they do not describe this as zero-knowledge, because it is not. Dropbox can read what you store there.
That is a defensible design for a product whose job includes previewing, indexing and searching your files. It is the wrong design for handing over a signed contract or an unreleased edit. Files here are sealed in your browser first, which means we hold bytes we cannot open. The filenames are sealed too, which most services leave in the clear.
What it costs
Dropbox Plus is the cheapest tier with a meaningful transfer size, at roughly $9.99 a month billed annually or $11.99 monthly, for 2 TB of storage. A standalone Dropbox Transfer plan exists with limited availability, giving 100 GB transfers and 2 GB of storage, but its price is not published.
Ours is ten dollars a month or a hundred a year for 10 GB per transfer and a terabyte of storage, and links that can be set never to expire.
Which one to use
If you already pay for Dropbox and the file already lives there, use Transfer. Re-uploading a file you have already uploaded is a waste of an afternoon and there is no prize for consistency. If you do not pay for Dropbox, buying storage to get a send button is the expensive way round.
