Can I share folders with my clients and not have them pay for extra Dropbox storage?

Question

I would like to upgrade to a paid account to Dropbox Plus and start putting my files there to collaborate with outside designers. We all work in Adobe InDesign with supporting linked files. We would all be using the Dropbox desktop app so we can open files directly from our file explorer/finder window and not have to download them.

If I own all the folders and files and share with the outside designers, will they be able to work in the app, save the InDesign file, add to subfolders, etc. if they are not paying members?

How does their storage get used, is it when they upload a new file to a folder/subfolder, or would those fall under my storage since I own the folder? I don't want them to have to pay as these are all my clients/folders but they need to be able to work in these files through the app. I hope this makes sense.

Rich · Accepted Answer

@magkel wrote:If I own all the folders and files and share with the outside designers, will they be able to work in the app, save ... to subfolders, etc. if they are not paying members?

If they're members of a shared folder, they need enough space in their account to hold the entire shared folder. If you have a paid account and share a 100GB folder with someone, they need at least 100GB of available space to add the share to their account. In other words, they don't benefit from your paid upgrade.

* https://help.dropbox.com/storage-space/storage-space

We all work in Adobe InDesign with supporting linked files.

Be mindful of the fact that if you're using linked files, Adobe likely saves those links using the full path to the files. If these files are in a shared folder and another member tries to open them, the full path on their computer will be different so the linked files won't be found.

Typically the only way that works (with ANY cloud provider) is if everyone has their Dropbox folder stored in the exact same location on their computer and everyone's shared folder has the exact same name.