Backblaze Pricing and Product Updates

(backblaze.com)

61 points | by precommunicator 2 days ago ago

17 comments

  • spzb 2 days ago

    In a normal world, price per terabyte would fall as a consequence of greater storage density and better power efficiency. A world with AI and a brewing oil crisis is not like that.

  • S0y 2 days ago

    >Free API calls: Effective May 1, we’re making API calls free for all B2 Cloud Storage customers.

    >Storage price: Also effective May 1, we are updating pricing from $6/TB to $6.95/TB

    Honestly amazing change. The free API changes are going to cut our bills in half. the 95cent increase per TB is totally reasonable.

    • kassner 2 days ago

      That’s a 15% price increase. Last increase from $5 to $6 was in October 3, 2023.

      • LunaSea 2 days ago

        This follows HDD and SSD price increases.

        • edmundsauto a day ago

          When you consider the rise in energy prices as well…

    • SunshineTheCat 2 days ago

      Same here, the API calls have always been heavier for me than the storage costs. It of course depends upon each use case, but this is overall a win for how I've been using it.

      Even with the storage increase, still way more affordable than S3 or many of the other alternatives out there.

  • dabinat 2 days ago

    B2 has serious performance problems on the US West Coast (and possibly other regions too) in the evenings. Between the hours of around 5 pm to 2am, somewhere between 1% and 5% of requests transfer at <= 1% speed. This is bad because it’s very noticeable to my customers. It’s so predictable that I have a script running in a West Coast VM that pings me whenever the problem occurs - it pings me around 50 times a day.

    Despite how predictable and reproducible it is, I’ve had a support ticket open for months with no progress. Having said that, even with this issue, B2 is still better than its (non-hyperscaler) competitors.

    • atYevP a day ago

      Yev from Backblaze here -> Do you have a ticket number I can reference and ask about?

  • gingerlime 2 days ago

        Price updates
    
        Free API calls: Effective May 1, we’re making API calls free for all B2 Cloud Storage customers.* This removes transaction costs and makes it easier to build, scale, and run high-volume workloads subject to our standard platform usage rules and Terms of Service.
    
        Storage price: Also effective May 1, we are updating pricing from $6/TB to $6.95/TB.
  • icza 16 hours ago

    Actually this price increase puts Backblaze B2 behind DigitalOcean's Cold storage which is $0.007/GiB, which equals to $6.5192/TB.

    Of course there are other considerations too (e.g. min size is 128KiB and 30-day minimum storage duration), but in some use cases DO Cold storage is now cheaper.

    • S0y 16 hours ago

      >designed to store and scale to tens of petabytes of infrequently accessed data...

      >During each billing cycle the Spaces Cold Storage service will have a 99.5% Uptime (as defined below) per month.

      It's not really the same product.

  • mrlonglong 15 hours ago

    What about a Linux backup client?

    • S0y 13 hours ago

      rclone?

  • marcosscriven 2 days ago

    I do wish egress were free, it’s one of the reasons I stick with Cloudflare R2 at the moment.

    • arsoon 2 days ago

      From the article - egress up to 3x the average stored data per month is free, and egress to some CDNs and compute partners is free (from another page: Fastly, Cloudflare, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Equinix Metal, Vultr, and phoenixNAP).

      Not sure it would make a difference with your R2 usage, but it might help you cut down costs some.

  • tom1337 2 days ago

    API call will be free starting May 1, Storage will increase from $6 / TB to $6.95 / TB

  • x0x0 2 days ago

    Arq + b2 has been my least-hassle mac backup storage solution by far. Even with this, it's still reasonably priced.