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Comment by syedkarim | Hacker News Reader

How is Backblaze able to be so much cheaper than the other, larger competitors? I assume Amazon/Google/Microsoft has squeezed every last cent from suppliers and also has highly cost-optimized staffing costs.

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Yev here -> great question! We are a bootstrapped company and we focus on inexpensive storage (https://www.backblaze.com/blog/vault-cloud-storage-architect...). Because we've built a robust system that doesn't use a ton of expensive components we can provide hot cloud storage (B2 Cloud Storage) and computer backup at an affordable rate while still making decent margins. To learn more about our business and decision making, we have a pretty cool series of entrepreneurship blog posts that might be interesting to some: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/category/entrepreneurship/

Reading about b2 pricing it says, you get "10GB of free storage, unlimited free uploads, and 1GB of downloads each day". Doesn't that amount to essentially free backups for (reasonable) personal use? Or am I missing something?

You aren't missing anything. I use B2 along with Restic to backup my Linux machines since their standard backup solution doesn't support Linux. It costs me around $1/month to backup my primary desktop and two laptops.

They had a blog post about doing this a while back, so they are definitely aware of the use case: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backing-linux-backblaze-b2-du...

I still use their standard backup service for my family's Windows machines since its more "batteries included".

I think even casual users tend to have more than 10GB of data these days.

I don't. Although I can easily fill up a terabyte drive, little of that is my own personal files that I need to keep if the drive blows up. Most of my stuff is source code, documents/notes and some photos (with photos being the only thing that takes up significant space). Almost everything else I can re-download or rebuild from the original source as and when I need it.

In total, sure, but at least for myself the really important stuff would fit in 10MB and I think I could fit all of the medium importance stuff in 1GB. The remaining terabytes are nice-to-have but I wouldn't be too upset if I lost it.

I'm over the 10GB free limit. It costs me about $1.50 a month to backup "irreplacable" data from my NAS.

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