I’ve just received this E-Mail from Backblaze, announcing a slight increase in storage cost.
In exchange, they offer a free download budget of three times the stored capacity.
Storage Price Increase: Effective October 3, 2023, we are increasing the monthly pay-as-you-go storage rate from $5/TB to $6/TB. The price of B2 Reserve will not change.
Free Egress: Also effective October 3, we’re making egress free (i.e. free download of data) for all B2 Cloud Storage customers—both pay-as-you-go and B2 Reserve—up to three times the amount of data you store with us, with any additional egress priced at just $0.01/GB. Because supporting an open cloud environment is central to our mission, expanding free egress to all customers so they can move data when and where they prefer is a key next
Product Upgrades: From Object Lock for ransomware protection, to Cloud Replication for redundancy, to more data centers to support data location needs, Backblaze has consistently improved B2 Cloud Storage. Stay tuned for more this fall, when we’ll announce upload performance upgrades, expanded integrations, and more partnerships.
I hope this company remembers their roots and keeps trying to minimise costs for the end users. Since their IPO, they’re expanding aggressively and built 2 new datacentres and are operating at a loss. Being a public company now they are beholden to share holders and will eventually seek to maximise profit.
Tale as old as time.