Backblaze Pricing and Product Updates | Hacker News Reader

Backblaze Pricing and Product Updates

backblaze.com

In a normal world, price per terabyte would fall as a consequence of greater storage density and better power efficiency. A world with AI and a brewing oil crisis is not like that.

That is not true. HDD Drive price or cost per TB hasn't dropped for a very long time long before the AI craze.

>Free API calls: Effective May 1, we’re making API calls free for all B2 Cloud Storage customers.

>Storage price: Also effective May 1, we are updating pricing from $6/TB to $6.95/TB

Honestly amazing change. The free API changes are going to cut our bills in half. the 95cent increase per TB is totally reasonable.

That’s a 15% price increase. Last increase from $5 to $6 was in October 3, 2023.

This follows HDD and SSD price increases.

When you consider the rise in energy prices as well…

Same here, the API calls have always been heavier for me than the storage costs. It of course depends upon each use case, but this is overall a win for how I've been using it.

Even with the storage increase, still way more affordable than S3 or many of the other alternatives out there.

B2 has serious performance problems on the US West Coast (and possibly other regions too) in the evenings. Between the hours of around 5 pm to 2am, somewhere between 1% and 5% of requests transfer at <= 1% speed. This is bad because it’s very noticeable to my customers. It’s so predictable that I have a script running in a West Coast VM that pings me whenever the problem occurs - it pings me around 50 times a day.

Despite how predictable and reproducible it is, I’ve had a support ticket open for months with no progress. Having said that, even with this issue, B2 is still better than its (non-hyperscaler) competitors.

Yev from Backblaze here -> Do you have a ticket number I can reference and ask about?

    Price updates

    Free API calls: Effective May 1, we’re making API calls free for all B2 Cloud Storage customers.* This removes transaction costs and makes it easier to build, scale, and run high-volume workloads subject to our standard platform usage rules and Terms of Service.

    Storage price: Also effective May 1, we are updating pricing from $6/TB to $6.95/TB.

Arq + b2 has been my least-hassle mac backup storage solution by far. Even with this, it's still reasonably priced.

API call will be free starting May 1, Storage will increase from $6 / TB to $6.95 / TB

I do wish egress were free, it’s one of the reasons I stick with Cloudflare R2 at the moment.

From the article - egress up to 3x the average stored data per month is free, and egress to some CDNs and compute partners is free (from another page: Fastly, Cloudflare, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Equinix Metal, Vultr, and phoenixNAP).

Not sure it would make a difference with your R2 usage, but it might help you cut down costs some.

Actually this price increase puts Backblaze B2 behind DigitalOcean's Cold storage which is $0.007/GiB, which equals to $6.5192/TB.

Of course there are other considerations too (e.g. min size is 128KiB and 30-day minimum storage duration), but in some use cases DO Cold storage is now cheaper.

>designed to store and scale to tens of petabytes of infrequently accessed data...

>During each billing cycle the Spaces Cold Storage service will have a 99.5% Uptime (as defined below) per month.

It's not really the same product.

What about a Linux backup client?

rclone?

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