Dropbox is storage. A gallery is a delivery

Be clear about what Dropbox is excellent at, because it is not close. Their published Plus plan is 2TB for $9.99/mo, with team plans from $15/user; sync is dependable, versioning saves you, and it is where your working files probably already live. As a place to keep photographs, it is very hard to beat on price and nothing here suggests otherwise. Encore is not a backup and should not be your only copy.

What a shared folder is not is a delivery. It shows filenames where a gallery shows photographs. It carries none of your branding - their published plans put custom branding on shared links from the Standard team tier up, and there is no photo-gallery presentation feature documented at any tier. It gives the client a file manager and asks them to behave like an operator.

The part that costs you real money is the record. A folder tells you nothing about whether anyone opened it, which frames they cared about, or whether the download ever happened. Encore writes every view, favourite and download into a per-studio append-only chain where each entry carries the hash of the one before it, exportable, and periodically countersigned by an independent timestamp authority. That converts "did you get the photos" from an argument into a lookup.

And the recurring one: link rot. Every dead or moved link comes back to you as an interruption months later, with the work of finding the files again attached. The gallery is largely buying that time back.

For a lot of photographers the right answer is BOTH: Dropbox as the archive and the working store, a gallery as the thing the client actually receives. They are not really competing for the same job.