Egnyting User Frustration

Egnyte surely has people talking. Though what they are saying has nothing to do with how impressed they are by the hybrid cloud provider. In recent weeks, cloud storage leaders Box and Dropbox have been taking serious efforts to expand on their business offerings; finally realizing the bubble forming. Unfortunately Box and Dropbox have spent so much time and energy focusing on consumers, that they have now dug themselves into a hole which no amount of vc funding can pull them out of. Unless they decide to take away the attractive deals to consumers, they will have to compensate by gouging businesses; at which time the users will funnel to enterprise providers like DriveHQ.

Egnyte thought that they were small enough to implement such a change without a dramatic effect to their user-base. The problem for Egnyte is that they lack an enticing selling point. When someone hears that their storage price is being hiked by more than 400% (yes this is a real number reported by an Egnyte user), they will simply find another, more reasonable provider. Anyone who is familiar with local vs cloud storage knows that the “hybrid cloud” term coined by Egnyte really refers to nothing more than using both the local and cloud server to save/store your data. This can easily be accomplished with DriveHQ – not to mention we guarantee that our users’ prices will NEVER increase; they will either decrease or remain the same until you unsubscribe.

Here is a preview of what some Egnyte users have been dealing with:

  • “We use Egnyte Cloud service to exchange files with our client..Recently they came to me and required to upgrade to their newer plans immediately. The price is 600% higher while most of the good features were cut off…. there is no grace period or early notification.”
  • “For some reason our entire account type has changed. We were on a group plan with 150GB of storage with 5 power users and 100 standard users. The latest invoice now shows us on an "office" plan with 1TB of storage with 5 power users and 5 standard users and an increase of 63% in the amount of the service fee! They never got any approval for this change and simply charged our CC on file for an entire year!”
  • “Egnyte just increased our bill by 100% and charge our creditcard. With the recent news, I contacted their billing department and they are not helpful at all. I'm doing a charge back on my creditcard and cancel their service.” It seems to be good business practice that if you are going to raise users pricing by an astronomical amount, you give them just a tiny forewarning. Of course Egnyte has the right to jack-up the prices if they enjoy the idea of commercial suicide, though it would be considerate to give their users time to jump ship before saying “it’s time to collect!” And all this after they had garnered another 30 million dollars only a few months prior."