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Comment by Laminary | Hacker News Reader

Working in video production, I know there are a lot of videographers and photographers "abusing" the unlimited nature of this service. It's not my business how BackBlaze does things, or if the usage falls within their acceptable use policy, but I see so many in my industry brag about the insanely cheap rates BackBlaze offers on their computer backup.

From my armchair, it seems like a bunch of personal users subsidize the freelance photo/video production industry. I wonder why BackBlaze doesn't give those extreme users the boot? Or, put in place a reasonable storage limit (e.g., 5 TB or something that 95% of users will be okay with.) I like BackBlaze but it always rubs me the wrong way when I see people in Facebook groups using the Computer Backup solution as if it were B2 or a higher-tier service.

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Exactly this "truly unlimited" sounds nice until you realize that you are paying for the average user of the service. In terms of cost it is good if you are above average, bad if you are below average.

Of course there is a real UX benefit to unlimited. You don't need to worry about what you can back up, project your growth and cost or hitting your limit. It is definitely simpler from the user side.

Maybe the marketing value of being “truly unlimited” outweighs the cost of the abuse? There are a good number of people who value the lack of cognitive load of fine print, even if they’re paying more for it.

Yev from Backblaze here -> We go into it a bit in the blog post, but over the last two years our average data stored for Computer Backup increased by 15% - it's not just a handful of people pulling the number forward. That plus the rising cost of hardware over the last year and a half resulted in us having to make this adjustment.

Or instead of a hard limit, make it $7 up to ${very_large_amount} then B2 pricing, so that 99.5% of your non-technical customers don't have to worry about where the limit is at all, and no one gets kicked.

+1 and same considerations apply for Linux users. Just charge people for usage above a certain threshold (high storage and bandwidth) and give "normal" people the flat rate.

At one point, Mozy which was another backup service acquired by EMC went from unlimited to flat rate up to some limit and then charged incrementally, effectively "firing" their heavy users. I wasn't even that extreme and it made Mozy very economically unattractive to me.

Backblaze knows the numbers and I don't but it's certainly possible that the heaviest users don't cost them that much relative to the benefits of being truly unlimited without much fine print.

There is probably just not enough of those types of users to really change the calculus for Backblaze.

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