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Backblaze B2 price increase + free egress
CyberneticTitan
Member
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/2023-product-announcement/
Storage Price: 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 step.
Not quite as competitive as iDrive e2 PAYG ($4/TB and 3x stored data egress fair use instead of hard cap), but from reading around here probably more reliable.
Note Backblaze is also part of the bandwidth alliance.
Comments
Meh, I’m fine with it. Great product
It wasn't just B2 they changed prices on. They changed it also on the personal side as well.
Yeah. Interestingly it seems the price will be exact same for me, since I have their 1-year extended history. I essentially go from $7 + $2, to $9 + $0.
How is this free egree/download will be calculated?
If i store 1 GB of data, I can download 1 GB of data monthly???
If you store 1 GB of data, you can download the first 3 GB for free and you'll be billed $0.01/GB if you download more instead of being billed for every GB you download.
so how is pricing different from cloudflare r2 now?
It’s still much cheaper per GB of storage, being 6$ v. 15$ however R2 has unlimited egress while B2 now has 3x the egress of whatever you store.
does anyone know if it's against Cloudflare's TOS to store videos/audios on B2 then serve those videos/audios via Cloudflare CDN? I saw some debates on this topic on Reddit but could not find the final answer
Cloudflare free yes it is against the ToS. Paid, no, it is fine.
Is it enforced? From what I have seen, it is not, but is it enforced wasn't the question asked..
Why do you believe that Backblaze is more reliable than iDrive?
It does break cloudflare's ToS on section 2.8
ToS 2.8 is no more however they did clarify the limitation on their updated terms of service.
I believe the limit is arbitrary and it depends if you get noticed or not.
Just don't use too much traffic but don't treat it as reliable.
If you do get caught cloudflare will send you a warning email.
To clarify only Enterprise users can legally use their CDN to send non-html content as stated on their Service-specific terms
Unless you are an Enterprise customer, Cloudflare offers specific Paid Services (e.g., the Developer Platform, Images, and Stream) that you must use in order to serve video and other large files via the CDN.I've looked into this question, and I believe the consensus is that Cloudflare keeps the terms deliberately non-specific.
My takeaway is that you're probably okay with using them to cache popular static content like images, but can run into problems with larger files if they aren't served through a paid Cloudflare service.
It is intentional as they want to be as flexible for everyone as much as possible. They don't want to be restrictive while at the same time add rules on what is allowed and not allowed. You don't want corporation run a full CDN on free tier at the same time you do not want a hobbyist student get forced to pay just for a CDN.
They definitely want to keep the Free users but at the same time not restrict them on a service they do not want to pay.
What benefit does CloudFlare derive from users who always only use their free tier, without ever getting a paid upgrade?
on this added note, Free tier users are also crucial to the long term plan for cloudflare to dominate the entire internet. The more websites use cloudflare the more advantageous they can be for their future services. For example the reason why cloudflare WARP works is because many websites use their CDN, maybe the reason why 1.1.1.1 resolves faster because many services use their DNS.
These advantages are both beneficial for both cloudflare and for the consumers, many companies will join the bandwidth alliance and everyone will get cheaper Egress.
It is to conquer and dominate and also to overwhelm competitors. Cloudflare is definitely going for a long game and the reason why nobody has gotten close to their level as of right now.
check my comment above ^^^
Same benefit as offering domains without markup (Cloudflare Domains) - locking you up in their ecosystem.
You'll eventually use some paid options (Pro Plan, Load Balancing, Images, Stream, Cache Reserve, R2, D1, APO).
They are playing long game and don't care about getting money from you now. Microsoft does exact same thing - they dont care if you pirate Windows, they'll eventually get long-term money from Microsoft 365 / Office / OneDrive / Game Pass / Azure / AI Copilot.
It's better for these corporations to get stable stream of money every month for 10+ years even if they need to wait for it than to earn from you once and you would switch providers because it was too expensive on start.
Also that's why all apps and games are going to subscription-based model. Cheap to get started, nice amount of money long-term.
Additionally, and this is the case with Microsoft too, your free home users are also likely running and making decisions in an enterprise. It won’t be every one, but maybe one in a hundred of those free users will contribute to some contract worth tens to millions of dollars. I’m sure many of Cloudflares / Microsoft / Google enterprise customers landed with a set provider because an IT person in a decision making position had a personal preference one way or another.
Applies to free or drastically reduced software for students also. Get them hooked outside the enterprise and hope they’ll result in business sales down the line.
Similarly some popular games follow a free to play model to prevent stagnation in player base. keeping both paying and non-payers in line.
This business model where your entire business revolves around how much users you have rather than how much "paying" customers you currently have is an interesting long term strategy that many companies are struggling with the normal premium only service.