Brian from Backblaze here.

> I'm quite curious about the economics of storage here.

When we started almost 8 years ago, we were CLUELESS about the economics of it all, and scared witless over it. :-) But I'm happy to report the grand experiment has been a modest success, we are profitable (by a small amount). We even have a little money left over every month to spend on marketing efforts now, and we're growing by every metric - more customers each year, more revenue each year, more employees to swap failed drives (38,790 spinning drives as of yesterday - some fail like clockwork each and every single day).