There are 2 main products under the Backblaze name: the sibling Personal Backblaze and Backblaze Business which are both used for cloud backups and the Backblaze B2, an IaaS platform.
Both solutions allow you to store and backup your data on the cloud, however, their intended user bases are different. Thus, it only makes sense that the pricing structure between these services is also different.
Regular Backblaze vs Backblaze B2
The regular Backblaze pricing is a set price per year or per month. Meanwhile, the Backblaze B2 is charged on a per GB of data downloaded and stored basis.
BackBlaze Personal and Backblaze Business
The regular Backblaze solution has a pricing structure per computer since you can only backup one device with every license. It is possible for you to buy more than one license at a time, however, there is no discount for doing so.
If you sign up for every month, you are billed $6 per month. This totals $72 for a year.
If you want a cheaper option, you can simply go with the yearly plan. It costs you $60, meaning you only pay $5 a month. Lastly, for the cheapest pricing per device, you can sign up for 2 years upfront for $110 per device. This translates to $55 a year or $4.58 a month.
Backblaze B2 pricing
B2 offers a storage price of $0.005 per GB per month. Take note, that the first 10GB of storage is free. Download costs, on the other hand, are $0.01 per GB per month. It also comes with 1GB of free download per day.
In addition, you are also charged for API calls. The first 2,500 calls each day are free and will cost $0.004 per 10,000 transactions after.
For the B2 customers, Backblaze also offers mailed physical devices instead of restoring via download. This will cost you $99 for a USB flash drive with 256GB capacity and $189 for an 8TB external hard drive.
The Backblaze B2 costs significantly lower than its major competitors the likes of Google Cloud Storage, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon S3 (previously known as Amazon Cloud Storage).
The cloud storage pricing for these giants comes in at 320 – 260 percent more costly than that of Backblaze. In addition, the download costs for these three solutions are 400 – 700 percent higher per GB of data than Backblaze.
Why is it so cheap?
With the ability to backup unlimited data at a lower price point, some people might be doubtful of the quality of service. However, the reason for this is that most Backblaze users only backup a relatively small amount of data, despite it being unlimited.
Therefore, Backblaze can offer unlimited data to power users at a cheaper cost since the overall average cost per computer stays low.
So, if you are looking for a cheap way to back up your data and don’t mind buying a new license per device, then Backblaze is an excellent option.