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Backblaze IPO

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Re: Backblaze IPO

#171

Post by apple4ever »

glenneroo wrote: post #130
jorams wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have paid for Backblaze for 4 years, after signing up for two 2 year subscriptions a few years apart. > I have never got it to backup my files ever. Why are you signing up for a two-year plan twice if you can't get it to work? They offer a free trial, so it's not like they're forcing you to pay before figuring out if it works.

Not to mention with a paid plan you can write to support and expect a fairly quick response. I also had some initial issues backing up with tons of files (during the trial) and support sorted me out after a couple back-and-forths over several days. I also bet if they couldn't figure out the issue, a refund wouldn't have been out of the question.

I had the opposite. Their support couldn't help me at all. Big reason I switched, along with the constant price increases.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#172

Post by caymanjim »

feifan wrote: post #61
braum wrote: post #15

Fidelity is handling the IPO and if you have been a customer of BackBlaze for a while apparently you will get to buy before public, up to 1,000 shares between $15-17 per share. That is my understanding.

I also see their IPO showing up in Robinhood's IPO Access list (i.e. available for purchase at the IPO price)

Not sure what Robinhood's selection criteria are, but participation isn't guaranteed.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#173

Post by MrManatee »

munificent wrote: post #87
rsync wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

""Fickle"? I've been a subscriber to the unlimited tier since seemingly forever, and I didn't realize it was now $7/mo instead of $5/mo. I think in the aggregate, subscriptions are pretty sticky due to inertia, etc." I wish that were the case and I wish that all customers were like you. However, I have been tracking - and discussing - these rates with this target market for longer than Backblaze has existed and this…

I think you may be overfitting to the backup enthusiast community which is likely a small fraction of their userbase. Most users: 1. Realize they should back up their stuff. 2. Hunt around for a backup solution provider. At this moment, they are probably very highly price sensitive. 3. Pick one and set it up. 4. Forget about forever, or until the house burns down. You will never ever see or hear these people on forum…

This. I’ve been a Backblaze customer for years. I’m not a backup enthusiast. To me it’s a problem I want to solve and forget about. If I needed to save money on utilities, I’d probably have more to gain by switching my electricity provider, my insurance provider, or my internet provider. The possibility that there might exist a slightly cheaper backup provider isn’t particularly exciting to me, and hasn’t been on my radar.

What has been on my radar is that my laptop has a small SSD, and in addition I have an external hard drive containing files that I want to back up but I rarely use. Backblaze used to require that I regularly plug in that hard drive and then keep it plugged in for a few hours. This was a total chore, and meant that I couldn’t just forget about my backups. I seriously considered switching backup providers because of that. Luckily Backblaze eventually introduced a slightly more expensive plan where I don’t have to do that. So at the moment I’m a satisfied customer, and I’m not actively looking for alternatives.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#174

Post by mdorazio »

apple4ever wrote: post #166
rsync wrote: post #38

I 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.

You are literally the exact type of bad customer the parent comment is referring to.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#175

Post by ineedasername »

rsync wrote: post #100
Matthias1 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you affiliated with rsync.net, competing with BackBlaze? Is the major difference with rsync.net that they charge per GB?

I am the founder of rsync.net. I don't think we are competitors. I have publicly criticized flat-rate storage pricing for many years[1]. That being said, I wish them good luck and will watch with great interest. [1] https://blog.kozubik.com/john_kozubik/2009/11/flat-rate-stor...

That's an interesting view on flat rate storage.

Although if you happen to be within the target audience for their business model (like I am) then it works pretty well, especially as a secondary off-site backup option. But yeah, if there's a threshold of, say, 2TB and > 5GB/day bandwidth that makes someone an unprofitable customer, then they should just set caps accordingly rather than claim unlimited.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#176

Post by argc »

brianwski wrote: post #157
robbiemitchell wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already had other (newer) computers being backed up, and this was a courtesy email to tell me I had failed to stop paying for monthly backups for a computer I had not opened (and thus synced) for years. He emailed me because the version running on that computer was considered so unstable as to be unreliable. Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I respon…

Hey Robbie- I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer. The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it. -- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, brianw@backblaze.com

This conversation makes me think you care about your users and inspired me to go look at pricing for personal laptop backup, and it appears that linux is not supported. Any plans to support it in the future? EDIT I might have not looked hard enough and there are potentially options out there, I just found https://help.backblaze.com/hc/en-us/articles/217664628-How-d...

Re: Backblaze IPO

#177

Post by jpalomaki »

Implicated wrote: post #159
jlmorton wrote: post #125

I 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…

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...

Articles like is the reason I started to trust BackBlaze in the first place. They go into details - just like with storage pod articles - on justifying why they can sell the service at lower price. Gives me confidence that low pricing is not just marketing trick.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#178

Post by stevecalifornia »

I wrote Backblaze and said "I would pay to ship you a drive so I don't have to upload 500GB over my consumer internet. That is my biggest pain point." and then the customer service rep replied that it wouldn't be a good business model to do that. Why is the customer service rep making these decisions? Just forward the email to your biz dev team.

Re: Backblaze IPO

#179

Post by selestify »

brianwski wrote: post #157
robbiemitchell wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already had other (newer) computers being backed up, and this was a courtesy email to tell me I had failed to stop paying for monthly backups for a computer I had not opened (and thus synced) for years. He emailed me because the version running on that computer was considered so unstable as to be unreliable. Yes, they could have proactively canceled my bill. Maybe they would have! We'll never know, because I respon…

Hey Robbie- I am touched you saved my email and remembered me, and that at the time you didn't respond negatively to the message. Thank you for being a customer. The only thing I regret is that comment about version number of 2.3.1 and the claim that it would run flawlessly for a decade. Oh geez, please upgrade to 8.0.1, you won't regret it. -- Brian Wilson, CTO Backblaze, brianw@backblaze.com

Is there a reason there’s a short limit on how long my Backblaze password can be? That’s what put me off using it before, because who knows what kind of encryption you guys are using if it can’t handle what my email provider is able to handle, all the while securing more sensitive data ;)

Re: Backblaze IPO

#180

Post by femto113 »

This is an interesting moment to reflect on the wacky nature of IPO vs ICO valuations. Backblaze and Filecoin are, roughly speaking, in the same business (providing bulk file storage). Backblaze is looking to raise ~$100 million at a valuation of about $0.7 billion. Filecoin raised $250 million in their ICO, and the coin has a current "market cap" of about $7 billion. Backblaze owns about 1.8 EiB of storage, Filecoin has about 13 EiB "pledged", so if you consider those measurements comparable the $ of valuation per EiB is similar. Businesses generally get valued more on what they bring in than what they own however, and Backblaze takes in ~$65 million/year revenue (~$175K/day). I'm not entirely clear what would be analogous to revenue for Filecoin, but they "mine" ~330K coins per day, which at current prices is about $21 million (or $7.8 billion per year?). Now here's where it gets crazy... based on the current average reward if Backblaze dedicated all of their storage to Filecoin mining they could (theoretically) generate about $2.5 million a day (or $900 million/year, about 13x what they bring in now).

Backblaze did look into farming Chia at some point[1], don't know if they've done similar experiments with Filecoin, but it definitely seems like there is a profound disconnect between these two worlds (which could be the result of some other factor, like the USD value of Bitcoin).

[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/chia-analysis-to-farm-or-not-...

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