Dropbox Replay vs a client delivery portal

If your footage already lives in Dropbox, Replay is sitting on top of it. No second upload, no second place to look, no separate bill, since it comes as part of a Dropbox plan or as an add-on to one. That is a real advantage, and it is why most people reading this page are using it rather than something else.

It is also the whole of the advantage. Replay is a reviewing layer over a file store: time-stamped comments, version comparison, markup, reviewers who do not need an account. Everything it does happens between “here is the cut” and “looks good”.

A freelance job does not end at “looks good”. It ends when you have been paid. The last mile — deliver the finals, send the invoice, chase the invoice — happens in email, which is where unpaid invoices in this industry go to sit.

Structural differences only; both products change their plans.

The invoice stops being a separate errand. The cut, the notes, the approval and the amount owed are one page, so your client does not have to find an email from three weeks ago to pay you, and you do not have to work out which of eleven deliveries is the one still unpaid.

“Can you send the files while we sort out the PO?” also stops being a decision you have to make. With the paywall on, the finals are there, watermarked, and the download unlocks itself when the payment clears. That is a much easier thing to hold than a personal boundary over email.

And the money does not route through us. Client invoices are direct charges on your own Stripe account, so the payment lands in your balance and settles on your own payout schedule. We take no cut of client work; Stripe deducts its processing fee at your own rate, as it would on any invoice you sent yourself. The pricing page sets out exactly how that works.

Keep Dropbox as your working drive and archive: your folder structure, your backups, and every internal round you do not want a client anywhere near. What moves is the client-facing version. One export, one portal, one link, with up to 8 GB per video on Pro inside 500 GB of active storage.

What you stop doing is exporting a watermarked preview by hand, emailing an invoice as a PDF attachment, and asking a client to confirm they received both.

If the material is sensitive, the portal takes a password, an expiry date and a download toggle per project, and every delivery URL is blocked from search engines at robots.txt. The limits of that are stated plainly on the security page, including the two things those controls cannot do.