Dropbox just dropped a bomb in the cloud-storage race, upping the amount of space for customers with its $99/year “Pro” account from the not-nearly enough 100 GB to a very-comfortable 1 TB. That’s 1 terabyte, as in 1000 GB, for those counting along at home.

It makes Dropbox that much more compelling. And it had to happen.

Even though Dropbox has its distinct advantages (in my mind anyway) over competing services from Box, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft, until now price has not been one of them.

The pressure from all of these competitors, many of them extremely well-heeled mega-corporations that see cloud storage as a value-added rounding error, meant that Dropbox had to do something to keep its current customers and attract new ones.

One TB for the price of 100 GB does that. And how.

You could get 1 TB from Dropbox before now, but it would have cost you a hell of a lot — $49.99 per month. Now that costs $9.99 per month.

One way you could look at this is that Dropbox is losing 4/5ths of its revenue per customer. Except that they’ll probably increase business tenfold. And most people won’t come anywhere near using the full 1 TB.

I’ve heard some suggest that the higher-than-Google prices charged by Dropbox — until now — were borne out of the fact that Dropbox uses Amazon S3 for its storage backend. For whatever reason, I guess that’s no longer a problem for Dropbox.

And it’s good for us, the lowly home user who really can’t spend $50 a month on cloud storage, even though it very well might be worth that much.

How enticing is $9.99 a month? Very.

It’s not like you can’t get equivalent storage from some these other providers for about the same price. But they’re not Dropbox. And they don’t offer a Linux client.

And from where I sit, Dropbox really IS better. The client program is pretty much flawless. Linux is a first-class citizen on Dropbox, which shows no sign of lessening that commitment. There are mobile clients for every device out there. And did I mention that Dropbox loves Linux more than its competitors? Well, for the most part they don’t love it (or Linux’s users) at all. Box, Google, Microsoft and Apple: None of them offers a Linux client.

And now Dropbox is extremely competitive on price.

That makes Dropbox a slam-dunk for me. Sure, there are other cloud-storage services that do offer Linux clients, including Copy and SpiderOak but the ubiquity and reliability of Dropbox has kept me in its corner. (Plus Copy and SpiderOak are not beating Dropbox on price.)

Dropbox wants you, the developer and the user, to think of Dropbox as your go-to filesystem for applications, too. I welcome that.

And with 1 TB for $9.99 a month or $99 a year, I can finally justify actually paying for the service. I bet millions of others will now feel the same way.

For those who feel more comfortable with their data ultimately not being stored in the Amazon cloud, even when they’re using Dropbox (which DOES use Amazon for its actual storage), there are always services like Copy and SpiderOak. I’m sure Copy has its own servers, and I think SpiderOak does, too.

But for me right now, Dropbox’s use of Amazon is more of a good thing than bad. Would I rather have 500 GB for $50 a year? Yes. But I can accept that Dropbox wants $99 a year out of me, and that’s that.

So if your cross-platform reality includes Linux clients and you want/need a terabyte of cloudy storage, the new Dropbox Pro looks pretty darn compelling.