FWIW, they did save my ass a couple of times, and for that I'm thankful. But I don't think their pricing is elastic at all. If it were to cross $10/mo per machine, I'd just roll my own, as I have a number of machines, and it's not difficult to roll my own.
Backblaze IPO
161–170 of 300 posts
Re: Backblaze IPO
#162Apropos of nothing, I'll share one of the reasons why I've been a loyal customer since 2010. In 2013 I booted up a dormant 2006 Macbook to prep for lending to a friend. Shortly thereafter I received the following email: === Hi Robbie (first name guessed from email address)- This is NOT an automated email, I'm typing this live. You have the very very last computer on earth running an ancient version of Backblaze (vers…
I'm confused here. How does a threat of deleting your data in less than 7 days and not even canceling your billing makes you a loyal customer? That seems quite awful, miss the email and your data is gone, and you end up paying without them even storing any data.
The CTO just said the truth. How else would he say that the customer's data will be deleted? Sure it was straight up blunt, but I think he was just speaking casually.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know anything about the technical sides of how these services are built, but through a client I do put heavy use to the B2 service and I can tell you there are some differences (backblaze covers some of that here [0]) in the way the services work. I get the feeling some of those are how they're shaving cost. [0]: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/design-thinking-b2-apis-the-h...
BTW, my client is also in a similar situation where the cost to store our files on S3 is prohibitive to profit on the product, where as.. I can't believe how cheap B2 is. ~ 300 million 10-40MB jpegs, peanuts compared to what S3 was.
At least with a 10mb avg file, 100 PUTs net them $0.005/month in storage fees. That's something.
In my use case, it's probably more like 10,000 PUTs for the same amount.
Backblaze, if you're reading this, I don't think anyone will mind if you put in place some kind of surcharge for people like me. I haven't moved to the service, and it's almost because I feel _bad_, like I'm abusing your terms, or something.
It's almost hard to even present a project to switch:
"Why should we authorize this project?"
"Because it eliminates our $5,000/month AWS spend on the task"
"How does it eliminate it?"
"It's free on Backblaze."
"What's wrong with Backblaze that it's free?"
Re: Backblaze IPO
#164I don't understand how Backblaze doesn't charge for PutObject B2 calls. I'm not complaining, I just don't understand it. At work, we have a use case where we store tens of millions of small files and mostly forget about them, never to read them again. (We later read maybe one out of a thousand, but we don't know what we'll need to read ahead of time, and the value of the files is substantial). Amazon charges us somet…
It could work if B2 customers use the service in a diverse enough variety of patterns to where the economics still work out in aggregate.
Yeah, I'm sure something like that is the strategy. The pricing is simple and easily understandable as-is. It's a nice marketing point to say all uploads are free, aside from storage costs.
Still, even if they had some ridiculously high surcharge for excess PUTs, I think it would be understandable, and would encourage people like me to architect a different solution that doesn't involve tens of millions of PUTs.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#165I dropped them for Arq. They kept raising their prices, and their support was bad. Just utterly pissed me off. Arq is cheaper and better (they actually have backup options!)
Re: Backblaze IPO
#166I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this…
I don't expect it to be free. But they keep raising the prices, and don't let longtime customers take advantage and extend. And on top of that, their support is terrible.
I ended up dropping them for Arq - $140 vs $60. No brainer.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is it possible that the $7 rate was only for new customers from the point the price change was instated, rather than for existing customers?
No, they did increase it for existing users. - One of those fickle users who bought all the extra credits he could at the original price.
And I'm one of those fickle users who was never notified about the price increase until it was due, and could not convince them to be a good company and let me extend at the old price for another year since I'm a good long term customer.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#168I find this part interesting - of the ~500,000 customers, 70,000 are B2 customers and 430,000 are "backup" customers ... which are flat-rate "unlimited" users. These flat-rate users are very fickle and price-sensitive. If you peruse subreddits related to cloud storage or online backup, etc., they are filled with very picky users who expect the product to be free - or close to free. It's a fools errand to pursue this…
For a backup service they have too many ifs and gotchas. I’d personally stay as far away from them. I’d rather want something that charges more and doesn’t offer that gimmicky unlimited storage and gives me unlimited versioning and external media and doesn’t delete anything as long as I’m paying and am within my storage limit. That simple. That’s why I preferred CrashPlan which had a desktop app much less polished th…
Check out Arq. I switched from Backblaze to them. They are good, similar to CrashPlan.
Re: Backblaze IPO
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah you can't do it through the platforms, but if you know someone bullish IRL there's nothing stopping you from making a meatspace agreement to sell them 100 shares of backblaze for $10 one year from today.
I think the SEC would view that as an unregistered put option (only legal for accredited investors), though I can imagine a gentleman’s agreement to quietly settle it in cash.
Yeah I mean, you also can't really bet on football games, but...
Re: Backblaze IPO
#170Seems like they have a decent business for home computer users, but the real story is B2.
B2 accounted for $14M in ARR as of June 2020, and $21.8M as of June of 2021.
That sector of the business could well outstrip the consumer side in a few quarters if growth continues.