It’s been just under a year since Backblaze‘s B2 cloud storage service came out of beta. The platform’s main selling point at the time was definitely its pricing, which undercut virtually all of its larger competitors (think AWS, Google and Microsoft). Today, it’s launching a new round of price cuts, this time focused on download cost. Instead of $0.05 per gigabyte, Backblaze will now charge only $0.02.
Typically, when we talk about the price of cloud storage, we talk about how much it costs to store a gigabyte of data on those various platforms. Often, though, the real cost for many companies is actually getting this data out of those services — either to move their backups or to serve their customers.
On Google’s cloud platform, this kind of network egress costs $0.12 per gigabyte for the first one terabyte of downloads (with prices dropping after that). As far as network egress goes, Google tends to be pretty pricey. Microsoft and Amazon tend to charge less, but even their pricing starts at $0.09 per gigabyte.
“For storage, we spent a decade building our custom Storage Pods and Vault cloud storage file system, and growing a culture that focuses on squeezing costs out at every layer,”Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman told me when I asked him about how his company was able to afford this price drop. “For bandwidth, though, it turned out that it’s just not as expensive as other companies are pricing it at. As soon as we realized that, we lowered the pricing.”
Budman also told me that over 50,000 people in 20,000 organizations now actively use B2.