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Comment by psanford | Hacker News Reader

I don't know. In my mind I consider backblaze to be a competitor to S3. Has S3 ever raised prices? It's honestly hard to imagine S3 ever raising prices (not that they couldn't, just that they have made it part of their marketing identity that they lower prices over time).

I think this will affect how people compare S3 to backblaze in the future.

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A backup service offering "unlimited" storage for a flat rate is not the same as a "bucket" of storage where you pay for exactly what you use plus data transfers out. To be profitable, Backblaze's flat price needs to cover their costs which are not only affected by storage hardware per GB getting cheaper but also average amount of storage customers use increasing. As Yet wrote in the post, "we had spent years enhancing the service and making it easier for people to store more and more data with us, thereby increasing our costs."

S3 has gotten a lot cheaper over time; in 2010, it was $0.15 per GB and today it's $0.023 per GB (Standard S3 in US East). Data transfer costs haven't changed as much but have gone down over time. At today's rate, $6 gets you ~260GB of S3 storage but file versioning will cost you more, restores will cost you more, and you'll have to supply your own backup software. Backblaze for desktop backups is not for everyone but I'd say it is for a lot more people than using an S3 bucket for desktop backups.

Backblaze is not a competitor to S3. S3 is meant for object storage that is easily accessible and it definitely doesn’t give you unlimited storage for $6 month.

And if you want to get a copy of your backup shipped to you from AWS, it’s a lot more expensive and convoluted to get a snowball prepared and shipped than the free service that Backblaze offers.

If you need an S3 like service though, Backblaze offers B2 which is much cheaper - and less redundant.

Backblaze is a complete backup solution. S3, well, isn’t. No non-techie would consider S3 to substitute for Backblaze. For that matter, no techie who values her time would consider it a substitute either.

Yev here -> Interesting! This price increase was for our computer backup service, not B2 Cloud Storage which does compete with S3. To my knowledge most cloud storage doesn't get more expensive as time goes on. We've had one competitor in the cloud storage space who did raise prices, but typically that trends down (we've decreased our download fees for B2).

Interesting to think about that perception though, I didn't consider that aspect of it!

When measured in dollars for all the data you have (what Backblaze sells), S3’s price goes up every time you create a file.

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