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.
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.