I’ve just received this E-Mail from Backblaze, announcing a slight increase in storage cost.
In exchange, they offer a free download budget of three times the stored capacity.
Storage Price Increase: Effective October 3, 2023, we are increasing the monthly pay-as-you-go storage rate from $5/TB to $6/TB. The price of B2 Reserve will not change.
Free Egress: Also effective October 3, we’re making egress free (i.e. free download of data) for all B2 Cloud Storage customers—both pay-as-you-go and B2 Reserve—up to three times the amount of data you store with us, with any additional egress priced at just $0.01/GB. Because supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, expanding free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer is a key next
Product Upgrades: From Object Lock for ransomware protection, to Cloud Replication for redundancy, to more data centers to support data location needs, Backblaze has consistently improved B2 Cloud Storage. Stay tuned for more this fall, when we’ll announce upload performance upgrades, expanded integrations, and more partnerships.
I think it’s a fair price increase because that $5 price have been there for a while.
They have to pay the rising electricity and internet bills, after all.
Agreed, plus x3 egress for free is really good
I don’t need egress at all. Storage is supposed to become cheaper each year. Yes, electricity did get a lot more expensive but we as a society are being fleeced at the moment.
Worth noting they are increasing the personal backup plan to $9
Free egress is fine and all, but as someone who uses cloud storage as a last resort, I’d want to pay less for storing that data, regardless of what it costs to get it back.
A 20% increase is a little bonkers. Do they give any reasons for this substantial increase? Computer storage prices have not gone up, from what I can see (they’ve gone way down from two years ago).
Back blaze is one of the OG “cheap cloud” storage providers.
They buy cheap stuff and develop cheap storage networks to charge cheap prices and stay in business. They publish entire papers on running cheap storage if you’re interested. It’s actually pretty interesting stuff.
They raised prices 20% (or $1). Hardware costs **may have gone down that much, but I’m willing to bet their energy and rent prices haven’t. They’re subject to services inflation just as much as anybody else.
Frozen pizza prices in my area have increased more in the last year than their services.
They use a company called 45Drives to build their infrastructure. Here you can learn more link
I used to use Backblaze before getting a NAS, and they were always very reasonably priced.
20% just sounds pretty harsh all at once. It’s not like someone can just migrate many TB of data to a different service overnight. And it’s $1 x #TB x every month. It adds up quick, unfortunately.
I’m still looking for a “cheap” cloud storage once my idrive e2 promo period ends. At some point, it’s just going to be more affordable to set up another nas somewhere, especially with Synology’s new full system backup with block-level incremental backup.
They do more than just tie hard drives together with a string. They build custom server hardware, maintain data center infrastructure including cooling and networking, pay their employees (the biggest cost), and all the overhead of running a business.
20% increase in one go is rather normal. Business tend to do one big price increase instead of constant small ones because our brains don’t see them billing efficiently relative to their costs, they see only a bunch of tiny price increases.
Yes and now imagine that tomorrow your house flood , now you have to download all your data from Backblaze you can be sure that it will be no extra charges for downloading that data.
If my only option to recover all my data was to restore my cloud backup (which it isn’t), I would not want to download TB after TB of data. I’d go with Backblaze’s “restore by mail” option and just pay for $189. Any data that’s important can’t wait weeks to restore anyway.
I was already getting free egress by going via Cloudflare (plus a small amount outside that that stayed within the free tier), so for me this is just a 20% price increase.
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I’m okay with this I only use them as one backup. Seems pretty reasonable with all the other prices hikes on energy and rent.
How is the personal plan for them? How are they towards… Alternatively obtained media?
It doesn’t matter as you’re encrypting your cloud backups anyway. You’re encrypting backups, right?
Bold of you to assume I have backups 🤣
Never had any issues with them
I heard mixed reviews ,for example just this morning I was reading about a guy that had an issue with his hard drive and he tried to restore from the backblaze personal app they were a lot of files missing. I personally use B2 which S3 compatible storage, it sound very complicated but they are a lot of tools out there that backup your files to S3.
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I’m not that worried about complexity. More about capacity and egress charges. It’s 7$ a month for unlimited storage and no egress on the personal plan VS 5$/TB a month for B2. It would be 20$ a month+ for me to go B2.
I hope this company remembers their roots and keeps trying to minimise costs for the end users. Since their IPO, they’re expanding aggressively and built 2 new datacentres and are operating at a loss. Being a public company now they are beholden to share holders and will eventually seek to maximise profit.
Tale as old as time.
Got here after reading the email (I don’t check email often); for me I’m just on the normal backup plan, but going from US$70 to US$99 is painful, it’s a 41% increase, after starting with them at US$60 just a few years ago. Really starting to think going with a NAS is better for my needs.
