Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze Product and Pricing Updates

backblaze.com

63 pointsingve28 comments

Backblaze is really underrated. Yes their UI sucks, and the group management really sucks, but the uptime and durability are fantastic and the price is great. Overall I'm a pretty happy customer.

Any recommendations for open source s3-compatible browsing tools? I only use CLI and rclone, but lately I've had a need for non-technical people to get into buckets.

https://github.com/minio/console#minio-console is AGPL if that aligns with your needs

Concur.

1. Technically, superb, but administratively, well, I very nearly lost my 1.5 TB of backups because of billing admin issues. I had my account, had uploaded my data, had the account for some time - year or two - came to change to the bank card. BB introduced some new validation stuff, which rejected my card - I can't remember the details now, something to do with billing addresses. I spoke to Support, got absolutely nowhere, and my account was one or two days from being cancelled due to non-payment - Support at this point I recall were simply not responding, and were letting the account fail - when I put in a random address, not the address of the card, and this was accepted.

2. Currently, BB accept cards only if the country of the bank address matches the country of the billing address. As such, I'm paying UK sales tax, because my FinTech has its corp address in the UK, even though my address is outside of the UK and in a country without sales tax.

I will be moving off BB, once I get a bit of time to research the next best choice. I'm not comfortable with the risk which comes with their administrative processes and support.

The developers for Cyberduck have their source open on github (https://github.com/iterate-ch/cyberduck) but the app does ask for a donation whenever you close it. I've found this to be the most reliable and the ease of use is incredible for a layperson.

Only issue is that it's only available on Windows or OSX.

Hope that helps!

Not open source, but I had my work buy me a license for: https://mountainduck.io/ and I quite like it

I use Nextcloud for my personal file storage - it’s easy to connect to Backblaze. Performance isn’t awesome, but it’s fast enough to work for my non-technically inclined family members as a google drive replacement.

Yev from Backblaze here -> that's for the feedback on the UI - we are working with an in-house UX team to get our UI updated as an upcoming project! As for browsing tools, I personally like Cyberduck. If it's easy enough for me to use, anyone can do it!

"As compute and storage continues to get cheaper, we've decided to raise our prices"

That seems harsh. If they really are raising B2 storage prices by 20% having held them unchanged for 7 years then in my country that's not even keeping up with inflation. And if they're charging flat rates for their other system but average data volumes have increased a lot - which seems very likely - then again a transparent increase in the pricing isn't unreasonable. The last thing I'd want for a backup service is to end up quietly cutting corners because they are no longer making enough money to do things properly.

Disk prices per TB are less than half what they were 7 years ago

Sure, but has the cost to own a TB dropped? Power, cooling, rack space, internet bandwidth, DC rental, tech time, health care, janitor, HR, etc. etc. etc.

People tend to forget that complexity goes up exponentially as the amount of data goes up.

Backing up 1TB can be done by anyone, 100TB is still within hobbyist skills. 1PB is Youtuber money. Anything upwards of that with data retention, backups, redundancy and uptime guarantees requires actual professionals who still want to be paid in dollars and not exposure =)

Not to mention I could see backblaze (and more specifically b2 keystore) being IOP limited. Sadly 16TB drives have approximately similar IOPs to 1TB drives.

The disks are only a small part of the costs

Sounds like an industry to be disrupted

Just to be clear, despite the quote marks, this is not a quotation from TFA

I don't think so. It is making egress free (up to 3 times the storage). It is definitely making cheaper for many customers.

It heavily matters how much their costs come from compute and storage. Even if compute and storage have dropped in price continuously over the years, labor has only gone up.

oddly, they're actually committing to higher storage usage, as they're gonna start offering one year retention as part of the base package, which used to cost $2/m extra, so in effect (from their perspective) they haven't really raised the prices so much as forced everyone into a more premium service tier. I'm guessing it's either because they were already retaining data for a year anyway and just hiding that from us, if we didn't pay for it or they don't anticipate it costing much more in terms of data, but each additional PC is somehow an extra expense enough to warrant charging another $20/yr

This is a small price increase for storage, but a significant price reduction for egress. IMO this is super interesting, because it makes B2 a feasible option for sync use cases.

For me this will cost a lot more as I pay almost exclusively for storage, but you're right this is an interesting idea. I'm ok with the price increase anyway, the rates are super reasonable and they don't increase often.

Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37241488

Today Backblaze changed their FY 2023 outlook https://ir.backblaze.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

”Today’s announced pricing and product updates help improve our ability to serve our customers, invest in further innovation, and support the financial strength of the company,” said Gleb Budman, CEO of Backblaze. “With these changes, we are targeting a $20 million ending cash balance in 2024 and returning to being cash flow positive by mid-2025.”

does this mean they're not currently profitable?

That's a complex question. Often for companies there's a "we are not cash flow positive by design as we are spending investor dollars to grow" vs "we are not profitable because the cost of serving our customers is more than they will pay"

This statement implies the former, not the latter.

So glad I switched to Arq Backup the last time they raised prices, or I'd probably still be with them and paying way more. And it was silly because all they had to do was honor their promise to let me extend my subscription one more year at the current rate.

But now I'm paying $50 a year for 2 computer backups instead of $200. Their loss!

Not me.... This is a 30+% increase for my 2 year plan. I have no need for the "extra" things. If I wanted them, I would pay for them. I now have til April to find another solution for 1 pc and about 7tb. Worst case, I will just buy an external and ship the drive to my parents. Use my Synology for local backup, and then the offsite drive. Not ideal but better than this increase.

Not to mention how BB is handling the pushback of the price increase by gaslighting their users.

I switched to Arq Backup the last night BB increased their pricing and refused to honor their promise to let me pay for another year at the current rate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com