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Backblaze B2 raising prices 16%
raindog308
Administrator, Veteran
in General
Just got this:
Starting on May 1, Backblaze will make changes to B2 Cloud Storage:
Free API calls: Effective May 1, we’re making API calls free for all B2 Cloud Storage customers* to make it that much easier to move and use your data.
Storage price: Also effective May 1, we are updating the price for B2 Cloud Storage from $6/TB to $6.95/TB.
Comments
We can all blame the AI boom...
ALL API calls free??
if that's ture, guess what, i pay less money , LOL
Looks like it benefits heavy applications which would've paid for API calls, at the expense of cold backup only usecases.
At first glance, it felt bad news but it feels good news to me now because the use cases that I had wanted would actually work better now without much shenanigans/clever loopholes that I wanted backblaze to be used for.
I agree with thepasta's comment that it comes at a sort of sacrifice for cold backup only usecases, maybe OVH's 2$ per month cold backup seems to be a good option if that works for some people/usecases.
Edit: talked to someone from backblaze, Egress is not free and is still the same. Only API costs are ended which might be good if you use s3 as a database or do frequent read/write for low amounts of data but aside from that, this might be net negative for most/(all?) people actually
https://www.backblaze.com/cloud-storage/transaction-pricing
The only thing which is updated is that transaction class B & class C api costs are removed that's it.
It’s basically a tax on cold storage to subsidize active apps. If you just dump backups and forget about them, you're paying 16% more for nothing. But for developers doing tons of small API requests, it might actually balance out. $7/TB or eben more... seems to be the new baseline for budget cloud storage now.
They knew that the $7 ™ is already taken by LE*
That’s how you deliver shitty news - serve them with vinegar and honey, so stench of vinegar compensated by the sweetness of honey. It looks ok, but the lingering putrid smell is here.
But hey, at least there is something to blame:
But not:
I mean, what this changes is how backblaze is used. It will stop being used as cold storage solution (use something like idrive e2)
Backblaze is definitely gonna be used for more dynamic things now where api costs are major. It isn't as if there aren't solutions but if someone relies on Backblaze for cold storage its definitely a question of is the price increase justified enough to move to other options (there are definitely cheaper options than backblaze in the market)
Well, they are shifting markets a bit. But on the other side, they increase power consumption and wear of their hardware.
Sue them! Rigged!
Not too surprising honestly.
Feels like a lot of storage providers are slowly increasing prices lately, especially with higher demand and infrastructure costs going up.
Still, B2 was one of the more affordable options, so even with the increase it might still stay competitive.
Not to downplay the other factors, but wars and AI are pretty established reasons for various cost increases across the board.
Financially, BackBlaze hasn't been doing great for a long time.
They have never been profitable. They're losing about $25m/year on $145m in revenue. Ouch.
What happened Aug-Nov 2025?
@raindog308 They are doing well technically the last time I checked their reports as they are quite open about their stats
The issue why their stock prices fell down 25%~ish recently iirc was because they weren't doing good enough
The word, "Enough" is truly a beast of its own. To each their own.
In terms of tech, yea, I love them. I use B2 every day.
But as a business…😬
Announcement and release of super hot fancy storage for AI workloads at 15 per TB, with some contracts or something. As far as I remember on the meeting writeup, it got well received at start as it was during general AI market craze, but investors noticed next quarter that AI clients are less stable (for backblaze) than general B2 users, and backblaze didn't respond well.
Even worse with the current price increase.
The bump has gotten me to take a look at my storage use on backblaze and start moving some cold storage workloads off it. Was never really the right tool for cold storage anyway, but when it was cheap it didn't matter
I guess the big concern would be that now API calls are free, do they invest in the resources to serve all these calls in a timely manner