Dropbox hits 100m users, offers free storage space in contest

Online storage firm Dropbox has only been in the game four years, but already it’s managed to reach 100 million users.

Dropbox was doing some celebrating on Tuesday with news that it has reached the 100-million-users milestone – that’s pretty good going for a start-up that launched only four years ago.

In a post on the Dropbox blog, Drew Houston, co-founder of the online storage firm, thanked users for “being part of the adventure” and said his team is still working on building and improving the service.

“Once upon a time, Dropbox had its humble beginnings in a Boston train station when I forgot my USB stick at home,” Houston wrote in the post. “We’re still unsure if it was fate or fluke, but one thing’s stayed the same all these years: each of us has a unique reason for using Dropbox.”

Houston told the NY Times the cloud storage service had quadrupled its user base in the last 12 months alone, adding that “even 100 million is still at a single dot percentage of the people we could reach.”

More recently, the San Francisco-based firm has had to deal with increased competition from industry giants such as Amazon, Google and Apple taking an increasing interest in the cloud storage market, though Houston appears unfazed by the big hitters’ moves.

“Those companies are busy trying to build something we had four years ago,” he told the NY Times. “We’re out front. We’re already out there and building smaller features and things. All those other companies have turf to protect, and they’re fighting a battle on a totally different front.”

While the speed of growth of Dropbox’s user base is impressive by any standards, there have been a few hiccups along the way. Earlier this year, for example, the firm suffered a breach which saw hackers access email addresses belonging to Dropbox users, resulting in a ton of spam email being delivered to their inboxes. The company has since beefed up its security.

To celebrate reaching the 100-million-users milestone, the firm is offering free storage space to senders of the best Dropbox-inspired stories. The top 10 entries will bag a generous 100GB of space, with 10GB being handed to senders of the next best 100 stories. Hop over to here to see what folks have come up with so far.