B2 Cloud Storage Product, Egress, and Pricing Updates
Storage Price Increase: Effective October 3, 2023, we are increasing the monthly pay-as-you-go storage rate from $5/TB to $6/TB. The price of B2 Reserve will not change.
Free Egress: Also effective October 3, we’re making egress free (i.e. free download of data) for all B2 Cloud Storage customers—both pay-as-you-go and B2 Reserve—up to three times the amount of data you store with us, with any additional egress priced at just $0.01/GB.
I'm okay with a $1 per month increase in exchange for 3x data stored egress free. I verify my backups monthly and I pay more than the $1 per month increase just in download fees for verification. I think with this change this also brings their price inline with Wasabi but Wasabi charges you for a minimum of 90 days for any data stored and has unlimited egress.
https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/
"If your monthly egress data transfer is greater than your active storage volume, then your storage use case is not a good fit for Wasabi’s free egress policy"
that is a good tradeoff. i do the same with wasabi but so far, wasabi never complained.
that works well for me, as i keep recent veeam backups files in wasabi and then move that to aws s3 deep glacier.
One thing I just realized is that this change also brings it in line with iDrive E2 which has 3x stored amount egress free per month. But iDrive E2 is much cheaper. Its either $4/TB/month if you pay as you go, or if you buy a year's worth in advanced then the price drops to $1.67/TB/month. I've been testing them out for a month now and its been fairly reliable but I am not sure how they are managing to charge so much less than Wasabi or Backblaze.
I do not know for sure neither but iDrive S3 operates on top of already successful data backup business (almost 30 years old). It means they have in place all infrastructure and try to make extra $$ by entering S3 storage space. $1.67/TB/month is reasonable price to sell with margin - especially it is only for yearly plans where user pays up front. They cash $400 per 20TB/year - I think it pays off in two years max (including redundancy, electricity etc.). It means IMO that it is sustainable from business point of view.