Jessica Guynn

USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO – With price wars heating up, Dropbox is lowering prices so consumers get more for their online storage buck.

Consumers can now get 1 terabyte of space for $10 a month, Dropbox announced Wednesday.

A $10 subscription to Dropbox Pro used to buy just 100 gigabytes. Customers paid $50 a month for 500 gigabytes, half as much as they will get now for $10.

The move is the latest sign of the growing competition online storage startups are facing from the fire-breathing dragons of the technology world.

Dropbox had resisted lowering prices, but with Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon setting their sights on the online storage market, it did not have much choice.

In March, Google undercut Dropbox by gutting prices on its Drive storage service. The tech giant reduced the cost of its one terabyte plan to $10 a month from $50.

"We pioneered the space and now our competitors have realized it's important and have started to focus on it," Chief Operating Officer Dennis Woodside said in an interview this week.

He says technology giants are trying to lock users into their devices and apps whereas Dropbox can flawlessly sync files across phones, tablets and computers, allowing customers to use whatever device they want.

"I am confident in our business model and in the opportunity ahead of us," Woodside said.

For years now Dropbox has been one of the most talked about startups in Silicon Valley.

Hundreds of millions of people around the world use online storage services to store, sync and share documents, photos, videos and music across multiple devices.

But Dropbox was among the first to catch on with consumers. Today 300 million people use Dropbox to manage their digital lives.

With hundreds of millions in venture capital, Dropbox seemed poised for a blockbuster IPO just months ago.

But then technology giants began dangling massive amounts of online storage at cut-rate prices in front of consumers.

Aaron Levie, CEO of competitor Box, predicts the intensifying price wars will ultimately make online storage "free and infinite."

And that has forced companies like Dropbox to take a hard look at their businesses.

With more than two thirds of its users overseas, Dropbox is planning to expand internationally. It's also building a sales team to help with an aggressive push for business customers.

But mainly, Woodside said his company is focused on the same objective as day one: Making sure its service is easier and better to use than anyone else's.

Dropbox said Wednesday it's rolling out new features requested by users that give them a more powerful product. Among the features: passwords for shared links, shared links that expire, view-only permission for shared folders and the ability to remotely wipe a device if it's lost or stolen.

The new features are part of a company wide effort to give users new ways to access, share and collaborate on documents, photos and videos, Woodside said.

Dropbox bought popular email app Mailbox in 2013 for $100 million and earlier this year debuted a photo-sharing app Carousel.

Forrester Research analyst Ted Schadler said he believes Dropbox has staying power.

"Dropbox has 300 million users and these are not casual users. They are deeply embedded in the service," Schadler said. "People say you can just move your stuff out of Dropbox and drag and drop it somewhere else. I don't think that's true. I think Dropbox has momentum. Dropbox has first mover advantage and it has executed on that really well."

The challenge going forward: To get more people to write checks to Dropbox, Schadler said.

Woodside would not say what percentage of Dropbox users pay for the service but analysts estimate it's in the single digits. Dropbox gives away two gigabytes of storage for free.

"When you have loyal users, you have a lot of room to experiment on ways to make money," Schadler said.