Kanbox

» see kanbox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

On 3 August 2015 fifteen million people found out they had sixty-eight days to move their files. Kanbox posted a notice: no new accounts and no new uploads after 10 August, service ending entirely on 10 October, and everything still sitting on the servers after that would be deleted and could not be recovered. The reason given was an adjustment to company business. Alibaba had owned the thing for less than two years.

Kanbox started in Beijing in 2011 and got called the Dropbox of China often enough that the label stuck. The money behind it was the well-known kind: angel backing from Xue Manzi and from Huang Mingming, and a twenty million dollar round led by DCM in October 2011. It did what Dropbox did. Files synced across your machines and your phone, a folder on the desktop that turned up on the handset. It worked well enough to hold fifteen million accounts.

Alibaba bought it outright in September 2013, at a price reported to be under thirty million dollars and below what the company had last been valued at. Then it did the obvious thing a company with Alibaba's balance sheet does in a market like that one: it turned the free tier up to ten terabytes per user. Not ten gigabytes. Ten terabytes, given away to anyone who signed up. That was the position from which it lost.

This one never came near me and the reason is what answers the storage question for most people, which is whatever is already on the phone. Turkish households arrived at cloud storage through the account the handset shipped with, and that account was Google's. Kanbox was never a service you rejected here, because reaching it meant finding it first, in a language and an app store that were not in the path. The category was settled by a default before anyone here had a chance to have an opinion about it.

~ the case file ~

~ ten terabytes for nothing ~

The Chinese cloud storage market between 2013 and 2015 was a capacity auction with no reserve price. Baidu and Tencent and everyone else with a balance sheet pushed free allowances into the terabytes, because storage was the cheap part and the account was the thing worth having. Nobody was charging, so nobody could win on price. The only lever left was who had already been installed.

That is a war Kanbox could not win after it was bought, and possibly could not have won before. Baidu Cloud came pre-attached to the Baidu products people already used and it took the market. Kanbox had a good client and a head start and neither turned out to be the deciding factor. By 2016 the Chinese regulator moved against the whole category over unlicensed file distribution and most of the survivors closed too, but Kanbox had already been gone for a year by then.

~ the sixty-eight days ~

The wind-down was fast and it was clearly written. Uploads and new accounts stopped one week after the announcement, which meant the service became read-only almost immediately and the remaining two months were purely for retrieval. Users were told plainly that data left behind on 10 October would be deleted with no way back.

Sixty-eight days is not unreasonable and it is also not much when what you are being asked to retrieve is years of photographs over a home connection. This is the recurring problem with free storage as a product. The thing being stored has real value to the person storing it and close to none to the company holding it, so the notice period gets set by whoever has the smaller stake in the outcome.

~ what fifteen million was worth ~

Fifteen million users would be a serious business in most countries. In Turkey it is more than a sixth of the population. Kanbox had that many and was shut for having too little of the market, which is the arithmetic that makes Chinese consumer internet different from everywhere else: the floor for viability sits where the ceiling is elsewhere.

Alibaba did come back to the category eventually, launching a new consumer drive product in 2021 with a different name and no reference to this one. Kanbox itself leaves nothing behind. There was no source release and no successor account anybody could import into. Fifteen million file collections were moved by hand or lost, and there is no record of which.

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