Overview

Dropbox, a global leader in cloud storage and file synchronization, faced challenges maintaining a cohesive experimentation platform as the company expanded through acquisitions. With multiple tools in place, inefficiencies and fragmentation emerged. To address this, Dropbox is unifying its feature flagging and experimentation by adopting GrowthBook, a scalable, flexible solution that aligns with its complex infrastructure.

Challenge

Dropbox’s experimentation infrastructure became increasingly complex and costly with each acquisition. Managing multiple platforms, including the internally developed Stormcrow system, became unsustainable. Stormcrow, while functional, did not meet the needs of all teams, especially front-end developers. Alex Kalish, Engineering Manager at Dropbox, was tasked with finding a solution that could handle Dropbox’s massive scale while addressing compliance, security, and operational demands. With over 3 billion feature evaluations and 1 billion logs processed daily, Dropbox required a scalable, self-hosted solution to meet its strict security standards and operational demands across its diverse tech stack, which included Go, PHP, Python, and TypeScript.‍

Key Challenges:

• Complexity and Costs: Managing multiple tools across different platforms was inefficient and expensive
  
• Slow Experiment Analysis: Results took 1-7 days, delaying decision-making
• Maintenance Difficulties: Stormcrow's bespoke required engineers to maintain and didn’t work effectively for all teams
• Limited Front-End Experimentation: Front-end developers struggled to run experiments without backend changes, causing delays

Solution

After evaluating several alternatives, Dropbox chose GrowthBook for its self-hosting capabilities, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. GrowthBook integrated smoothly with Dropbox’s existing tech stack, including Databricks. The company is consolidating its experimentation tools into a single platform, enabling Dropbox to realize significant monthly cost savings.

‍GrowthBook offered:

• Scalability: GrowthBook supports Dropbox’s scale, handling billions of daily evaluations and logs.
• Compliance, Security: Self-hosting meets security and data privacy requirements.
• Cost-Effectiveness: GrowthBook was more affordable than alternatives.
• Seamless Integration: The platform integrated easily with Dropbox’s data warehouses and logging systems.
• Open-Source Flexibility: GrowthBook’s open-source nature allowed customization and avoided vendor lock-in.

Early Traction without Heavy Engineering Effort

GrowthBook allowed Dropbox to gain early traction by integrating experiment analysis directly with its existing tools and data. This seamless integration meant that teams could start benefiting from the platform without significant engineering effort. By simply hooking GrowthBook up to existing data streams, teams can quickly experience the value of its capabilities, even before transitioning all experiments to the platform.

Implementation

Dropbox deployed GrowthBook on AWS, leveraging its self-hosting capabilities to meet compliance and security requirements. The planned migration process involves consolidating experiments from six legacy systems into GrowthBook, while key components such as feature gates and kill switches remain on those systems. As part of this transition, GrowthBook was seamlessly integrated into Dropbox’s existing infrastructure, including its logging pipeline and data warehouse, which processes 1 billion logs daily, ensuring minimal disruption, security, and compliance. New experiments are now launched within GrowthBook as they are created.

Migrating from Stormcrow to GrowthBook

With GrowthBook’s SDK, Dropbox’s front-end developers can run experiments independently in Go, PHP, Python, and TypeScript to ensure standardization and eliminate backend dependencies. Before GrowthBook, experiments required custom code and notebooks, and required significant technical expertise and maintenance. Setting up a single experiment could take up to a day with custom development. GrowthBook’s intuitive UI simplifies the process, reducing onboarding complexity and operational overhead. The only technical requirement may involve writing SQL for a new metric. As a result, the team can launch experiments faster and with greater consistency.

Results

‍Dropbox saw significant improvements in experimentation speed and efficiency:

• Analysis Time Savings: Experiment analysis that took days can be done in minutes. Front-end developers feel empowered to iterate on experiments without backend changes.
• Faster Experimentation: Front-end developers can now run experiments without backend modifications, cutting setup time from days to hours.
• Scalability and Control: Dropbox manages 3 billion+ daily evaluations and 1 billion+ logs, while maintaining full control over data and compliance by self-hosting GrowthBook.
• Reduced Complexity: Dropbox replaced a third-party vendor with GrowthBook, significantly reducing the time required to manage the legacy system infrastructure.
• Better User Experience: Front-end developers can toggle experiments on and off without reloading pages, speeding up the process.

‍"With GrowthBook, you can toggle experiments on and off without reloading the page. It's a lot faster for front-end developers."
— Alex Kalish, Engineering Manager, Dropbox

Future Plans

About 50% of new experiments each month are built and run in GrowthBook instead of Stormcrow. Migration continues as experiments in Stormcrow naturally expire, with plans to move all new experiments to GrowthBook. Additionally, Dropbox plans to integrate tools such as Atlan to enhance metric management. Alex and the team continue to collaborate with GrowthBook on new features, including improved presentation capabilities for executive dashboards.

Conclusion

Dropbox has successfully migrated off one third-party tool and is now focused on transitioning from Stormcrow, which supports the majority of its experimentation infrastructure. Early wins—such as replacing a 3rd-party tool and seamlessly integrating GrowthBook—demonstrate the value of this effort. Dropbox is on track to fully consolidate its experimentation platforms, further streamlining operations and improving efficiency.