Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates

Now that they are publicly traded, you can see their financials and they have been losing money every quarter. This price increase doesn't appear to be because it is more expensive to store data and provide their services on top of that - gross margins are roughly the same as a year ago.

Instead their increasing losses appear to be entirely due to an increase in staff costs, which are growing faster than their revenue. Last quarter, they spent $10M on R&D, $10M on sales and marketing, and $6M on general and administrative. These operating expenses were actually greater than their revenue, which means even if hard drives and the other associated costs of revenue were $0, they would still have lost money.

Unlimited basically means I’m subsidizing people who are storing 50tb of content on their home machine, and also incentivizing people like me to store stupid shit because otherwise I’m wasting money. While it’s allowed under the rules, I’d rather pay less for a set storage limit that is priced sustainably than play the unlimited vacation policy type game.

Idk, some top of mind thoughts. Misty annoyed that everything in my life is getting expensive

My friend called me over to transfer his data and apps from one PC to a newer one. No problem.

So I did an inventory and figured out how it needed to happen, and he had a nice USB drive we could just use as intermediary.

I dragged-n-dropped every last file over there. I can't remember the details, but for some reason, I needed to wipe the source drive, because it was also the destination or something.

I did a "Properties" check to compare the HDD with the USB and something wasn't right. The file and folder counts were both far too small. I looked at my friend and said "I don't like this... should I proceed?" and he goes "Yeah!"

So I wipe the source and do the partition and install, and yeah, all his Thunderbird mail has gone missing. Eventually I realized it was my utter rookie mistake of not showing hidden files before drag-n-drop.

So I'm white as a sheet and shaking in my boots when he goes "but what about my BackBlaze?" "Your what?" Something he didn't even mention while I was taking inventory!

So we get the little agent installed, and check out his file space, and his whole livelihood comes screaming down the pipe, and I can breathe again, and we celebrated success over some homemade kombucha.

2019 Backblaze increases monthly prices 20%.

2021 Backblaze increases monthly prices 17%.

2023 Backblaze increases monthly prices 29%.

Boiling frog scenario for sure. And I recommend BB to all my friends and family, but at $108/year, I'm starting to get close to just using Time Machine and an external SSD.