Backblaze Raises Subscription Pricing of Personal Backup to $7 Per Month

Backblaze CEO Gleb Budman, writing on the company blog:

Over the last 14 years, we have worked diligently to keep our costs low and pass our savings on to customers. We’ve invested in deduplication, compression, and other technologies to continually optimize our storage platform and drive our costs down—savings which we pass on to our customers in the form of storing more data for the same price.

However, the average backup size stored by Computer Backup customers has spiked 15% over just the last two years. Additionally, not only have component prices not fallen at traditional rates, but recently electronic components that we rely on to provide our services have actually increased in price.

The combination of these two trends, along with our desire to continue investing in providing a great service, is driving the need to modestly increase our prices.

Backblaze is a phenomenally good backup service and I’ve been a happy customer for several years now, with two active backup licenses for my Macs. I joined when their pricing was $5/month and only recently, they had raised their pricing to $6/month. Even at $7, Backblaze offers exceptional value — you’re literally getting unlimited backup. And for a couple of bucks more, they’ll keep your files for a whole year! I wrote down why I like the service so much the last time they raised prices.

However, their raising prices are making it incredibly difficult to recommend the service to most of my friends. The problem with their subscription is their all-or-nothing approach and the lack of localized pricing. Many of my friends have a few hundred GBs of important data that they want to back up. The Backblaze subscription is priced at almost ₹550 per month. How do you convince someone, who already doesn’t take backups seriously, to opt into a backup strategy that costs 3 times their cellular service?

I wish Backblaze B2 was the answer, which is something the company itself recommends for small quantity backups. But a subscription where your monthly expenses can vary depending on how much data you upload/download is even more difficult to recommend to friends.

If you’re convinced, here’s my affiliate link that’ll give you month free when you sign up, and a month free to me when you start paying for it.

July 14, 2021 ✚ Permalink

Backblaze B2 Now Has S3 Compatible APIs

Backblaze has just announced that it’s cloud storage service B2 is getting S3 compatible APIs. This is a massive release that makes the low-cost service compatible with tons of products, services, plugins, and apps out there.

For reference, B2 pricing starts at just $0.005/GB/month compared to $0.021/GB/month offered by Amazon.

May 4, 2020 ✚ Permalink

Backblaze Raises its Subscription Prices, But it’s Still Well Worth It

Let’s face it — Backups are IMPORTANT.

There are no two ways of looking at it. You either have backups, or you’re fucked! If not today, then tomorrow.

Without backups, you’re living a risky life that doesn’t value the data you have. Your important files, photos of your loved ones, client files, app preferences, the files you’ve downloaded over the years — they’ll all be gone one day if you don’t have backups.

I have been using Backblaze — a popular online backup service, for many years now. Backblaze has been providing unlimited personal backup service for $5/mon. Whether you have a Mac or a PC, whether you have a measly 128GB SSD in your Mac or whether your PC is stuffed with Muti-terabytes of Hard Drives, Backblaze will back it all up for just $5/month or $50/year. Not only can you do a full restore of your backup — via multiple reliable methods — in the event of a horrible data loss, but you can also log into the website to browse and download individual files, remotely, whenever you want.

These are easily the best $5 you’ll spend in a month to get a feature-rich and reliable backup service for your computer. If you’re in India, that’s less than ₹10 a day, or about the cost of a cutting chaai.

Earlier this week, Gleb Budman — Co-Founder and CEO of Backblaze — announced some changes to the subscription pricing of Backblaze, starting next month. The company is raising the prices of the subscription by $1 month — that’s right, by a dollar.

Monthly Plan: $5 → $6
Yearly Plan: $50 → $60
Two-Year Plan: $100 → $110

This is the first change in pricing since the launch of the service in 2008, over 10 years ago.

Gleb explains why they had to raise the subscription:

The short answer is that we have enhanced the service in many ways and storage costs have gone up. We have continually removed impediments to getting data backed up — no file size restrictions, speeding up uploads, all while data sets have grown larger and larger. We’ve worked hard to avoid raising our prices, which resulted in some great storage innovations and has allowed us to keep our original prices for more than a decade. By making this decision now, we are ensuring we can continue to offer unlimited backup and keep improving our Computer Backup service. I’d like to go into further detail on the two primary sources of our increased costs: 1) enhancements to the service, and 2) the market cost of storage.

Even at $6/m, Backblaze is a fantastic purchase that everyone should be using. Take a look at some of the comments by customers on the blog post announcing this change. People sure are crazy!

If you still aren’t convinced, here are my top three reasons why Backblaze is worth it!

  1. You get Unlimited Backups. I’m currently backing up close to 12TBs of data to the service.
  2. You can Remotely Access and Download any file or folder from your backed up data, using their website. They even give you mobile apps to download files up to 5GB.
  3. You get Native Apps for your Mac or PC that comes with a whole bunch of features to help you efficiently upload your data. You can throttle your uploads depending on how much bandwidth you have or want the app to use, and you’ll need this for that initial batch of uploads.
  4. You can Offload Files to B2 for permanent storage and free up space from your computer. This is especially useful if you work with video projects and have old archival data. Sure, additional B2 pricing applies, but it’s super cheap.

If you aren’t already using Backblaze, do sign up using this link and you’ll get a whole month of Backblaze for Free.

February 15, 2019 ✚ Permalink