How to terminate your worst enemy's Dropbox account for only $795

TL;DR: Here is how to do what it says in the title:

Create a Dropbox for Teams account. This will cost you $795.
Invite your Dropbox-using enemy to your team. They don’t have to accept, but it’s pretty enticing. 1TB of storage (not just for your folders - for all their stuff!), and you’re paying for it!
Once they accept, revoke their team access. This completely deletes their Dropbox account (not just the “team’s” stuff).
Now, the story: So I was working for this startup in the summer, and they use Dropbox for Teams. I already had a Dropbox free account which I had used for school and a few personal projects. I did not really need more than 2GB for myself, but I had a few shared folders for personal projects, and for school I had public read-only shared folders to which several school friends had permalinks.
When I started working with the startup, they added me to their Dropbox “team”, which (besides being necessary for work) was awesome for my personal use - hey, 1TB that I’m not paying for, right? Of course I didn’t mind that it would be on my “regular” account.
At the end of the summer I stopped working with them, and yesterday they removed me from their Dropbox “team”. Hey, it makes sense that they shouldn’t pay Dropbox for my 1TB anymore.
What doesn’t make sense is that Dropbox immediately deleted my account when this happened. Completely. It signed off all my clients, and when I tried to use the “forgot password” feature, it told me an account with my email does not exist. The client left all the files on my machines, so I didn’t lose any personal data - it wasn’t a catastrophic failure. What I did lose:
Lost access to shared folders that weren’t owned by me.
Lost the access list for folders that were shared by me.
Lost a few additional free megabytes I got by referring friends to Dropbox, etc.
All the permalinks for my public read-only folders that I shared with my school friends were invalidated.
Had to wait many hours as my flimsy ADSL connection re-uploaded ~2GB of data to a newly created Dropbox account.
I tried contacting Dropbox on twitter and using their site’s support contact form, and they have not yet gotten back to me. If I get a response from them, I will include it below.
In case you’re wondering, this is not a bug: it appears to be documented (sort of).
Here is a FAQ question about it:
https://www.dropbox.com/help/211/en
Quote (emphasis mine):
“If someday you leave the team, it may not be possible to convert your Teams account back to an individual account that you can access.”
By the way, the email inviting you to join someone’s “Teams” account does not mention anything about never being able to go back. Here is the email I received when I was added:
Hi Yoni,
<name> has invited you to join "<team name>" on Dropbox for Teams!
To accept this invitation and upgrade your account, visit:
https://www.dropbox.com/team/confirm_migrate?signup_key=<blablabla>
If you have any questions, please contact <name> at <email> or [email protected].
Welcome to the team!
- Dropbox
Finally, since this is correct and documented behavior, I encourage you to use it to delete your enemies’ Dropbox accounts (they’re already your enemies, so it’s gotta be worth $795 to piss them off, right?). Let me know how it went :)
Yoni.
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