Regarding account storage

mansarin
edited March 16, 2017
Dear Developers,

I apologize in advance for writing a complaint here. Based on other discussions in this forum, I assume complaints are frowned upon. Besides, this has probably been stated multiple times before. But perhaps bringing it up once more might help us and others make better decisions about where to store our references. If this matter ought to be directed elsewhere, please let me know.

Zotero offers 300 MB of storage for each user, with additional storage available at an (expensive) price. That's far too little for storing pdfs and forces our group to use other sharing systems to get pdfs across. Most of my colleagues have already switched to Mendeley, mainly because of the convenience issue: Mendeley offers 2 GB of free storage. They are able to keep their reference information and their pdf files together in one place.

Would it cost so significant an amount to increase the free storage available to users to a higher amount, to 1 GB or more? Or do you expect the free storage for each account to remain the same in the next few years?

Cheers,
Mohammad Ansarin
  • adamsmith
    Different apps have different pricing strategies. Zotero's higher tiers are cheaper than Mendeley's, and it places no restrictions on groups, groups storage (which is limited to 100MB in free Mendeley) & group sizes.

    I think overall that's a fairer pricing model, but of course YMMV.
  • mansarin
    Adamsmith,

    Thanks for the response. True indeed, but limiting group storage to the owner's storage means that each Zotero group also has a limit of 300 MB. It's fairly simple (and common) for a group to create a joint Mendeley account and use that to get 2gb of free "group" storage as personal storage.
  • RintzeRintze
    (I don't think constructively-written complaints are ever unwelcome. Some complaints have a hostile tone or are downright trolling, and we have do issues with those)

    Regarding your issue: I don't know if Zotero will increase their free storage limit anytime soon (it was last updated from 100 to 300 MB in 2012: https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-storage-subscriptions-upgraded/), but if you look at the broader picture the situation isn't really comparable between Zotero and Mendeley. Zotero developers have indicated that the storage fees support most of Zotero's development and maintenance costs. It's not at all clear whether Mendeley is self-sustaining, or whether it and its larger free storage plan are mostly being subsidized by its parent company, Elsevier.

    Also, once you go beyond 2 GB, Zotero's paid group plans (e.g. $120/year for unlimited group storage) are much, much cheaper than those of Mendeley, and for most workplaces this cost would be insignificant.
  • dstillman
    edited March 16, 2017
    True indeed, but limiting group storage to the owner's storage means that each Zotero group also has a limit of 300 MB.
    I'm not sure what you mean by this. You can have one unlimited account that's the owner of all groups in an organization.

    Are you just saying that you don't want your organization to pay anything but want more free space for everyone to use Zotero? That's a fine position, of course, but we have to support development, maintenance, and infrastructure/storage costs somehow. For personal libraries, if you don't want to pay for Zotero storage, you can use WebDAV syncing.

    I'm not sure what the deal is with Mendeley's pricing at the moment — they seem to have discontinued their team plans, which (if I recall) previously charged obscene rates based on how many groups and collaborators you had (which has always been unlimited in Zotero). It seems like they might be switching to something closer to the Zotero model (though still with a limit on collaborators for free plans), but apparently shared storage space is "under review", which is truly bizarre.

    In any case, as Rintze says, our paid plans compare pretty favorably to Mendeley's, with no restrictions on groups or collaborators, and are also pretty equivalent to, say, Dropbox's (which charges $99/year for 1 TB, or $120 if you pay monthly, but doesn't have cheaper options).
  • adamsmith
    which (if I recall) previously charged obscene rates based on how many groups and collaborators you had
    oh yes. You could easily pay $1,000/year; it might be that no one actually did that. I think they're mainly pushing institutional plans now (which have unlimited groups&group storage included), which is where the real money is.

    If I had to guess, the idea is to sell libraries/institutions Elsevier all-around packages covering the entire workflow from lab notebook (Hivebench), through literature search (Scopus), reference management (Mendeley), and data repository (Mendeley Data).
  • mansarin
    @all, I appreciate all your responses. Mendeley is out to make money, so their pricing does not have to necessarily match their costs. Hence, charging more for more users, even though most costs result from data storage.

    @Rintze, regarding comparing Mendeley and Zotero, from the user point of view they're the two main reference managers that organize pdfs too (main here just meaning they're the most common and least buggy ones). The unlimited option does indeed make a lot of sense, though we're not sure if paying 120$/year wins over the inconvenience of having things just stored on our university servers.

    @dstillman, I meant free group storage was limited to free personal storage, which was 300 MB. But I was unaware that Zotero offered to connect to WebDAV servers for file storage. This fixes the situation for me, and means others in my situation have an alternative. Thanks again!

    Cheers,
    Mohammad Ansarin
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