Dropbox Passwords App Will Be Available To Free Users With A Catch

Dropbox has become pretty much a dumping ground for anything and everything that needs to be stored on the cloud. Last year, Dropbox realized that those included even passwords, often stored in plain text files. While the cloud service does have encryption, it's still an inefficient and risky way to store passwords you want to be synced to all devices. That's why it created its own password manager to add to the already congested market and now it is making that available to its free Basic users but with one very important limitation.

Dropbox Passwords arrived along with Vault and Backup to give Dropbox users more incentive to pay for a monthly subscription. The premise is that these give users the proper features in Dropbox, like security and redundancy, that they are already using it for in unofficial ways. There are, of course, dozens of password managers out there, including Google's Chrome-only version. But if you're using Dropbox to store passwords in text files, you probably aren't using any of those anyway.

Dropbox Passwords has all the basics you'd expect from this kind of app, from storing and syncing passwords across devices to creating strong passwords in the first place. Its headlining feature is its zero-knowledge encryption that promises only you will ever have access to those passwords.

It doesn't come cheap, though, since it requires at least a $9.99 per month Dropbox Plus subscription. Of course, you get a lot of other benefits, including Vault, Smart Sync backup, Transfer, etc. but it might be overkill if you only want to sync passwords. Fortunately, Dropbox is announcing that Passwords will be available to free Dropbox Basic users, but they will only be able to sync only 50 passwords at most.

Dropbox Passwords for free users isn't exactly available yet but you can sign up to be notified when it goes live. Dropbox says that free users will also be able to share a password with anyone, like when sharing Wi-Fi passwords, but that is also still coming soon.