I don't know about y'all, but I've fallen in love with having my files in the cloud. Anybody who seriously used multiple devices in the early 2000s had a personal thumb drive for moving files from their home to work to school. And I think we can all agree it was a giant pain in the 🍑. But now we have the cloud! And while the term might be silly, I couldn't love its functionality any more.
I personally use Dropbox and Google Drive the most. Being that I'm always broke, I also stay on their free plans, like most people. However it doesn't take long to run out of space, thus began my quest to learn how to get as much Dropbox space for free as possible. Turns out adding free Dropbox space isn't all that hard!
If you find yourself looking how to add free Dropbox space too, then check out all the different methods I found. Note these methods are always changing. Since I initially wrote this, Dropbox has removed a method that used to give 5GB of free space.
Easy Free Dropbox Space
The easiest methods for adding Dropbox space also come with the smallest rewards, but don't let that fool you into overlooking them! They give you almost an entire free GB of space combined together and it only takes a few minutes to acquire it all.
First, after creating your Dropbox account, add 250MB of space by going through the Dropbox Getting Started guide.
After that, you'll want to follow Dropbox on Twitter for another free 125MB in space. While you're there, connect your own Twitter and Facebook accounts to Dropbox for 125MB each.
Finally you'll want to head over to Dropbox's Get Space page and click on “tell us why you love Dropbox.” Type whatever you want and you'll be rewarded with a final free 125MB in space.
Advanced Free Dropbox Space
Finally comes the hard part of “how many friends do you have?” I only ask because the final method of free Dropbox space requires you to refer your friends into using Dropbox. For every friend you convince to join, you'll receive 500MB in free space. You can get up to 16GB(!) in freebies here, so that means you'll need … let's see, carry the 2 … divide by 1 … order more donuts … ah yes, you'll need 32 friends in order to get all this space.
I'll admit, I've only referred 4 or 5 people, but that alone is worth at least 2GB of space, which covers a lot of meme photos and goofy, drunken, 2am videos! Plus since it's free to make a Dropbox account, it's not hard to convince a friend to sign up.
Potential Free Dropbox Space
Dropbox hasn't enabled additional storage in exchange for creating a strong password for your account, but they've said they want to do so as a reward for users.
“One of the things we're working on right now is a project we haven't broadly disclosed yet, but it's really to incentivize consumers to go through a security health check both in terms of the authentication settings, the sharing settings, etcetera, and when they complete that they may get additional free storage space as an incentive.”
Patrick Heim, Dropbox's head of trust and security – July 2015
It goes without saying a stronger password is best for you no matter what, free space notwithstanding.
In addition to a strong password, you should consider enabling two-step verification for your account. This is actually a more secure move than simply changing your password and it's easier to track. Companies like Mailchimp already give discounts for enabling two-step, so it's not crazy to think Dropbox couldn't be far behind.
Free Dropbox Space Summary
At the current time, this means you can 750 MB of guaranteed free space and up to another 16 GB of free Dropbox space. If you want to see all the free space you've managed to score, here's how to find the Dropbox free space page:
- Click the smiley face in the top-right corner.
- Click Settings.
- Select the Plan tab, then click “View more earned space” near the bottom of the page.
So there ya have it! I hate to say there used to be a lot more ways to get space – Dropbox gave 3GB of space for downloading a camera app and 1GB of space for a mail app, but they've since shut those services down. However, when Dropbox releases more methods for getting free space, I'll update and republish this post!
