A Dropbox alternative for sending video to clients.
Storage grew a preview. Delivery needs a watch page.

For a rough cut going to a producer who already lives in your shared folder, that is completely fine. The friction only appears at the end of the job, when the file is the deliverable and the client is not an editor. Then three things happen at once. The file is at its largest, because it is the finished master. The audience is at its least technical, because it is the client and the client’s stakeholders. And the caps that Dropbox applies to previews are written for documents and photos, not for a two-hour picture lock.

Every limit below is published by Dropbox and fetched today. None of them is a secret, and none of them is unreasonable for a storage product. They are simply the wrong caps for a finished film, and they all bite on the same day.

Read the duration cap carefully, because it is the one people misread. It is set by the plan of the person who owns the file. A colourist on a free account sending a three-hour concert film has sent a thirty-minute preview, and nothing the client does at their end changes that. The same article caps preview resolution by plan as well, with the free tier limited to 1080p. So a 4K grade viewed from a free Dropbox account is reviewed at a quarter of its pixels and stops before the second act.

The size cap is blunter. Under 100 GB there is a player. Over it there is a message saying the file is too big to preview, and an instruction to download and open the file on your own computer. That is not a degraded viewing experience. That is the end of viewing, and the start of a support conversation with a client who now has a 140 GB file in their Downloads folder and no application that opens it.

The upload side has its own edges. Dropbox’s maximum file size is 2 TB, which is generous, but uploads larger than 375 GB in a web browser may time out or be interrupted. The Replay add-on lifts the preview ceiling to 150 GB and supports up to 12 hours of audio and video, and Dropbox states that Basic users must upgrade to Plus or higher before they can buy it. So the fix for the size cap is two purchases deep for anyone on the free tier.

Two caveats belong on this page rather than in a footnote. 8K plays when the viewer’s hardware decodes it, and a laptop that cannot decode an 8K stream will struggle here the same way it struggles anywhere else. And ProRes 422, ProRes 4444 and DNxHR are hosted for client download rather than streamed, because browsers do not decode them. Camera RAW is never streamed at all. The honest workflow for a mastering codec is the one every studio already runs: finish to HEVC or ProRes, stream the HEVC, keep the ProRes as the download.

The review side is the same page rather than a separate product. Versions sit together, comments carry timecode, deliverables are handed over from the same place the film plays, and distribution roles decide which audience gets which cut. On Vault, masters open in the native app only, with screen capture blocked, a session watermark, a forensic per-person mark and a tamper-evident view log. Files are never sold and never used to train AI, which is a clause in the Terms with a 30-day notice rule, not a policy page that can be quietly rewritten.

The second cost is more boring and matters more. If your studio already runs on Dropbox for everything, adding a second place for one file is not free. It is another login, another invoice, another folder convention for a freelancer to learn, and one more question of where the current version lives. That cost is real, and it is the correct reason to stay put. The case for moving the delivery step is only strong when finished films are a regular output and clients watch them rather than collect them.

Two more things Dropbox does well and should be said plainly. A recipient without a Dropbox account can still open and preview a shared file, so there is no signup wall between you and your client. And Dropbox’s previewable format list is broad: .3gp, .3gpp, .3gpp2, .asf, .avi, .dv, .m2t, .m4v, .mkv, .mov, .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .mts and .mxf, with .mxf requiring a paid account. That list covers almost everything an editor exports. The caps that decide a delivery are size, duration and resolution, not the container.

Beyond a plan, storage is sold in blocks at $40 per TB hot and $20 per TB cold, a month. That is the whole rate card. There is no delivery line on the bill, and no daily allowance to run out of halfway through a launch week.