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I’ll possibly be going against the grain, but they have really made a fanfare about this one. I’m a subscriber and I remember the email coming though and it fel

I’ll possibly be going against the grain, but they have really made a fanfare about this one. I’m a subscriber and I remember the email coming though and it felt a little too over-sensitive to me. You’re putting the prices up by a dollar a month, you’ve been losing out in real terms because of inflation for years, and I already have gigabytes upon gigabytes of data stored with you. I’m not moving for an extra $12 - and even then I was too lazy to take the promotion because it’s a business expense and having to process the additional invoice didn’t feel worth the bother. But I’ll admit that one is a more of a reflection of me than Backblaze. I understand you’d be worried about a price increase but the email, promotion, two years of lead up time, and now the blog post comes across and a little too apologetic, perhaps. Just stick the prices up by a dollar and give me a quick “sorry guys, we’ve not raised them in a decade - we need to stay competitive” and I wouldn’t have even remembered it.

kalleboo 7y ago
You and I feel that way, but there are a LOT of people who are extremely price sensitive, especially in a world accustomed to race-to-the-bottom app pricing. When we adjust our app price, or have a sale, we can really notice it in reactions in our support in-box.
- jackcodes 7y ago
  You likely have more experience in that regard than I do so I’ll take that on board, but to frame my point in a more semi-positive light; I feel enough goodwill to backblaze that embarking on a 6 month project with some of your most senior engineers to deliver a credits system just to soften the blow of a price increase, in a market without a clear competitor feels like overkill. You don’t need to do all this for my dollar a month! I do actually trust them enough to not screw me over, their price increase history alone showed me that. Sometimes the quick and forgettable slap to the face is more pleasant than the long drawn out apology - although as you mentioned from your experience, maybe I’m in the minority.
  - timcederman 7y ago
    No, you are correct, a minor price increase like this after a long period of stability is a blip for most customers.
  - atYevP 7y ago
    Yev again -> thank you for the trust :)
- lostcolony 7y ago
  Out of curiosity, is it angry complaints along with cancellations, or just angry complaints? Customer feelings matters, but that momentarily "I hate this change wargarbl!" is generally trumped by having a solid, useful service that is competitively priced (even in the face of increase).
- dboreham 7y ago
  Important to point out that the fact that some people are disagreeable people is not your fault.
- trhway 7y ago
  this is why you do market segmentation - for the folks who buy storage requiring weekend overnight stay you do all the belly dance with apologies around 10c price increase, for the other folks, ie. the ones paying from corp account for the backups with FIPS140 certified encryption applied - just a 30 day notification of 2x price increase with 3pt size font deep at the bottom of that fat corporate bill.
watersb 7y ago
Fair point, but I see it simply as an intentional decision to operate a business in this manner. Proceeding with care, deciding up front how to evaluate a change, execute the plan, and post-mortem analysis. Test-driven development of business operations.
wendyshu 7y ago
Yes it came across as melodramatic.
- iamnotacrook 7y ago
  It was a bit like a Stack Exchange blog, wasn't it. They weren't keeping up with inflation. That's not even a price increase in real terms - they should probably do what (UK, at least) mobile networks do and just increase the prices by the official rate of inflation each April - that would let them defer actual price increases for longer.
atYevP 7y ago
Yev from Backblaze here -> Jack that's interesting insight, thanks! What's funny is that I was the main driver internally for tone and the process as a whole. We definitely had some intense conversations about the "band-aid" approach where we'd announce and raise shortly thereafter, and the approach we took which was a bit more measured. In the end, I think we spent a lot of time making sure that we were taking care of the customers, but you're right, our tone in certain communications did come off as a bit apologetic. The truth is we'd never done it before, so we weren't really sure what the reaction would have been - so we erred on the side of caution. Now that we have data points, if we ever need to do this again we'd likely still take an open, honest, but maybe more blunt approach. Tough to say though because I try to default to default to empathy, which means my takes are usually softer. Those conversations are some that didn't quite make it to the blog post, but finding the right balance for us was an interesting process!
- jackcodes 7y ago
  This is new to me too, so I can’t take any expert high-ground here as I’ve never had to do one either. From that perspective I’m glad that you wrote the blog post as I’ve learned a few things from it. But as a customer I can say that you have a really good reliable service, and one that I’ve shopped around for. You’re effectively my only point of failure for personal artefacts and one of only a couple for anything work related. I do implicitly have an immense amount of trust in your product and let’s be honest, you aren’t charging all that much for it. This is to say if you were to take the more direct and blunt approach next time I absolutely wouldn’t hold it against you - in fact I’d say you don’t need to devote so much sweat into something that is just another fact of life. Costs go up, I’ll get over it, so don’t worry more than you need to. I can tell your heart is in the right place though which gives me confidence and thanks for your response too!
- caseysoftware 7y ago
  Fundamentally, your customers want you to make money because when you do, you stay in business and stay happy, healthy, and able to hire great people and innovate. Please don't apologize (much) or be timid about applying changes that protect the service, customer experience, and business as a whole.
inapis 7y ago
>because it’s a business expense This here is the reason. For you and I, this is not an issue but some people can be extra ordinarily sensitive to the prices. And even if most of the customer base is fine with it, some will be quite vocal on the internet and one media house needs to run with it and Backblaze will find itself in a PR nightmare. Though I agree that they unnecessarily wore their heart on their sleeves. A coupe months ago, Basecamp went down and their blog post was profusely apologetic (almost as dramatic as Backblaze's blog here). People pretty much told them to shut up in the comments and carry on with their work. That's the thing, this price increase flies in the business world. Not necessarily in the consumer world.
- jackcodes 7y ago
  It’s getting late my time so excuse the brief response; it’s a business expense in the sense that I’m effectively a sole trader, so I bear as much of the cost as if it wasn’t a business expense. Rather than it being paid by a multinational corporate and having to chase down someone from accounting I’ve never met. Laziness (and liability, to a certain extent) is that I’m responsible for keeping accurate records and invoices for all my business expenses for 6 years and if I’m not in the right mood to take that on sometimes it just doesn’t quite hit the value threshold for me to process But I appreciate your points and it might factor into my mentality.
psanford 7y ago
I don't know. In my mind I consider backblaze to be a competitor to S3. Has S3 ever raised prices? It's honestly hard to imagine S3 ever raising prices (not that they couldn't, just that they have made it part of their marketing identity that they lower prices over time). I think this will affect how people compare S3 to backblaze in the future.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> Interesting! This price increase was for our computer backup service, not B2 Cloud Storage which does compete with S3. To my knowledge most cloud storage doesn't get more expensive as time goes on. We've had one competitor in the cloud storage space who did raise prices, but typically that trends down (we've decreased our download fees for B2). Interesting to think about that perception though, I didn't consider that aspect of it!
- extra88 7y ago
  A backup service offering "unlimited" storage for a flat rate is not the same as a "bucket" of storage where you pay for exactly what you use plus data transfers out. To be profitable, Backblaze's flat price needs to cover their costs which are not only affected by storage hardware per GB getting cheaper but also average amount of storage customers use increasing. As Yet wrote in the post, "we had spent years enhancing the service and making it easier for people to store more and more data with us, thereby increasing our costs." S3 has gotten a lot cheaper over time; in 2010, it was $0.15 per GB and today it's $0.023 per GB (Standard S3 in US East). Data transfer costs haven't changed as much but have gone down over time. At today's rate, $6 gets you ~260GB of S3 storage but file versioning will cost you more, restores will cost you more, and you'll have to supply your own backup software. Backblaze for desktop backups is not for everyone but I'd say it is for a lot more people than using an S3 bucket for desktop backups.
- massysett 7y ago
  Backblaze is a complete backup solution. S3, well, isn’t. No non-techie would consider S3 to substitute for Backblaze. For that matter, no techie who values her time would consider it a substitute either.
- 7y ago
jonplackett 7y ago
Agree with this. You’d think they were putting them up 50% or something. My local council did that with parking fees a year ago. They didn’t tell anyone or say sorry and everyone just sucked it up. But then I can’t cancel my local council account.
mc32 7y ago
Agree, you either grab more market share to grow or when that slows, you raise prices like any good SaaS does. The worst thing is going bankrupt and wholly inconveniencing paying customers because you weren’t making a profit.
cmonnow 7y ago
> and I wouldn’t have even remembered it. that's the point.
Animats 7y ago
"Need to stay competitive"? Disk prices per byte are decreasing. Bulk bandwidth prices are decreasing. Prices should be going down, not up.
- herf 7y ago
  SSD/HD ratio likely went up. Backing up a laptop ten years ago with 128GB SSD wasn't as hard a job as backing up 1TB SSD, which is now rather cheap.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev here -> Interestingly, they aren't decreasing as quickly as they once were and that was part of the impetus for the increase. I touch on it in the article and we go further in detail in the original announcement, but it used to be that the data growth of the customer was more or less negated by drive capacity increasing and cost per gigabyte going down - but that trend has stymied recently.
- mikeash 7y ago
  Price per byte doesn’t really matter for an unlimited service. As that cost goes down, your users will have more and more data to store, in an amount that will basically cancel out.
  - naniwaduni 7y ago
    Sounds like an argument against running an "unlimited" service.
    - gowld 7y ago
      Having a successful business for a decade and raising prices once in the smallest marketable unit of currency, sounds like an argument for doing exactly what they are doing with their "unlimited" service.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      How so?
InAnEmergency 7y ago
Or just follow Amy Hoy's advice[0] and only raise the price for new customers. They probably could have bumped their prices by more than $1/month (and sooner) if they had taken that approach. [0] https://stackingthebricks.com/one-weird-trick-to-raising-your-monthly-price-without-a-customer-revolt/ https://stackingthebricks.com/one-weird-trick-to-raising-you...
cwyers 7y ago
If it wasn't for this blog post, I'm not sure I'd know right now how much I'm paying for Backblaze, and it's very possible I will forget by my renewal date.
neximo64 7y ago
> you’ve been losing out in real terms because of inflation for years This is inaccurate. If you break down inflation into its constituents electronics, storage, transfers and cpu have gone down dramatically. An increase of 5 to 6 is 20%, which is far more than 10 years of inflation, even if you account for it being averaged. I don't know how I can read this as anything but spin. Good on ya guys for increasing prices but don't give it out as spin.
- prawn 7y ago
  And if the data stored by users has grown significantly in that time? I know the amount they store for me would've at least doubled since I started as a customer: core laptop drive, then I have 3-4 externals I regularly connect.
- gowld 7y ago
  You may have overlooked or forgotten that Backblaze charges a flat rate per client device, not per gigabyte stored or transferred.
- mthoms 7y ago
  That's only a small part of the picture. The amount of storage each customer occupies has probably gone up considerably in the same time frame. I know my HD size (and backup usage) has quadrupled over 10 years. And don't forget that the cost of salaries, rents, electricity, professional services, marketing and well, pretty much everything aside from bandwidth and hardware have gone up. In some cases rather dramatically.

kalleboo 7y ago

You and I feel that way, but there are a LOT of people who are extremely price sensitive, especially in a world accustomed to race-to-the-bottom app pricing. When we adjust our app price, or have a sale, we can really notice it in reactions in our support in-box.

jackcodes 7y ago
You likely have more experience in that regard than I do so I’ll take that on board, but to frame my point in a more semi-positive light; I feel enough goodwill to backblaze that embarking on a 6 month project with some of your most senior engineers to deliver a credits system just to soften the blow of a price increase, in a market without a clear competitor feels like overkill. You don’t need to do all this for my dollar a month! I do actually trust them enough to not screw me over, their price increase history alone showed me that. Sometimes the quick and forgettable slap to the face is more pleasant than the long drawn out apology - although as you mentioned from your experience, maybe I’m in the minority.
- timcederman 7y ago
  No, you are correct, a minor price increase like this after a long period of stability is a blip for most customers.
- atYevP 7y ago
  Yev again -> thank you for the trust :)
lostcolony 7y ago
Out of curiosity, is it angry complaints along with cancellations, or just angry complaints? Customer feelings matters, but that momentarily "I hate this change wargarbl!" is generally trumped by having a solid, useful service that is competitively priced (even in the face of increase).
dboreham 7y ago
Important to point out that the fact that some people are disagreeable people is not your fault.
trhway 7y ago
this is why you do market segmentation - for the folks who buy storage requiring weekend overnight stay you do all the belly dance with apologies around 10c price increase, for the other folks, ie. the ones paying from corp account for the backups with FIPS140 certified encryption applied - just a 30 day notification of 2x price increase with 3pt size font deep at the bottom of that fat corporate bill.

watersb 7y ago

Fair point, but I see it simply as an intentional decision to operate a business in this manner. Proceeding with care, deciding up front how to evaluate a change, execute the plan, and post-mortem analysis. Test-driven development of business operations.

wendyshu 7y ago

Yes it came across as melodramatic.

iamnotacrook 7y ago
It was a bit like a Stack Exchange blog, wasn't it. They weren't keeping up with inflation. That's not even a price increase in real terms - they should probably do what (UK, at least) mobile networks do and just increase the prices by the official rate of inflation each April - that would let them defer actual price increases for longer.

atYevP 7y ago

Yev from Backblaze here -> Jack that's interesting insight, thanks! What's funny is that I was the main driver internally for tone and the process as a whole. We definitely had some intense conversations about the "band-aid" approach where we'd announce and raise shortly thereafter, and the approach we took which was a bit more measured. In the end, I think we spent a lot of time making sure that we were taking care of the customers, but you're right, our tone in certain communications did come off as a bit apologetic. The truth is we'd never done it before, so we weren't really sure what the reaction would have been - so we erred on the side of caution. Now that we have data points, if we ever need to do this again we'd likely still take an open, honest, but maybe more blunt approach. Tough to say though because I try to default to default to empathy, which means my takes are usually softer. Those conversations are some that didn't quite make it to the blog post, but finding the right balance for us was an interesting process!

jackcodes 7y ago
This is new to me too, so I can’t take any expert high-ground here as I’ve never had to do one either. From that perspective I’m glad that you wrote the blog post as I’ve learned a few things from it. But as a customer I can say that you have a really good reliable service, and one that I’ve shopped around for. You’re effectively my only point of failure for personal artefacts and one of only a couple for anything work related. I do implicitly have an immense amount of trust in your product and let’s be honest, you aren’t charging all that much for it. This is to say if you were to take the more direct and blunt approach next time I absolutely wouldn’t hold it against you - in fact I’d say you don’t need to devote so much sweat into something that is just another fact of life. Costs go up, I’ll get over it, so don’t worry more than you need to. I can tell your heart is in the right place though which gives me confidence and thanks for your response too!
caseysoftware 7y ago
Fundamentally, your customers want you to make money because when you do, you stay in business and stay happy, healthy, and able to hire great people and innovate. Please don't apologize (much) or be timid about applying changes that protect the service, customer experience, and business as a whole.

inapis 7y ago

>because it’s a business expense This here is the reason. For you and I, this is not an issue but some people can be extra ordinarily sensitive to the prices. And even if most of the customer base is fine with it, some will be quite vocal on the internet and one media house needs to run with it and Backblaze will find itself in a PR nightmare. Though I agree that they unnecessarily wore their heart on their sleeves. A coupe months ago, Basecamp went down and their blog post was profusely apologetic (almost as dramatic as Backblaze's blog here). People pretty much told them to shut up in the comments and carry on with their work. That's the thing, this price increase flies in the business world. Not necessarily in the consumer world.

jackcodes 7y ago
It’s getting late my time so excuse the brief response; it’s a business expense in the sense that I’m effectively a sole trader, so I bear as much of the cost as if it wasn’t a business expense. Rather than it being paid by a multinational corporate and having to chase down someone from accounting I’ve never met. Laziness (and liability, to a certain extent) is that I’m responsible for keeping accurate records and invoices for all my business expenses for 6 years and if I’m not in the right mood to take that on sometimes it just doesn’t quite hit the value threshold for me to process But I appreciate your points and it might factor into my mentality.

psanford 7y ago

I don't know. In my mind I consider backblaze to be a competitor to S3. Has S3 ever raised prices? It's honestly hard to imagine S3 ever raising prices (not that they couldn't, just that they have made it part of their marketing identity that they lower prices over time). I think this will affect how people compare S3 to backblaze in the future.

atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> Interesting! This price increase was for our computer backup service, not B2 Cloud Storage which does compete with S3. To my knowledge most cloud storage doesn't get more expensive as time goes on. We've had one competitor in the cloud storage space who did raise prices, but typically that trends down (we've decreased our download fees for B2). Interesting to think about that perception though, I didn't consider that aspect of it!
extra88 7y ago
A backup service offering "unlimited" storage for a flat rate is not the same as a "bucket" of storage where you pay for exactly what you use plus data transfers out. To be profitable, Backblaze's flat price needs to cover their costs which are not only affected by storage hardware per GB getting cheaper but also average amount of storage customers use increasing. As Yet wrote in the post, "we had spent years enhancing the service and making it easier for people to store more and more data with us, thereby increasing our costs." S3 has gotten a lot cheaper over time; in 2010, it was $0.15 per GB and today it's $0.023 per GB (Standard S3 in US East). Data transfer costs haven't changed as much but have gone down over time. At today's rate, $6 gets you ~260GB of S3 storage but file versioning will cost you more, restores will cost you more, and you'll have to supply your own backup software. Backblaze for desktop backups is not for everyone but I'd say it is for a lot more people than using an S3 bucket for desktop backups.
massysett 7y ago
Backblaze is a complete backup solution. S3, well, isn’t. No non-techie would consider S3 to substitute for Backblaze. For that matter, no techie who values her time would consider it a substitute either.
7y ago

jonplackett 7y ago

Agree with this. You’d think they were putting them up 50% or something. My local council did that with parking fees a year ago. They didn’t tell anyone or say sorry and everyone just sucked it up. But then I can’t cancel my local council account.

mc32 7y ago

Agree, you either grab more market share to grow or when that slows, you raise prices like any good SaaS does. The worst thing is going bankrupt and wholly inconveniencing paying customers because you weren’t making a profit.

cmonnow 7y ago

> and I wouldn’t have even remembered it. that's the point.

Animats 7y ago

"Need to stay competitive"? Disk prices per byte are decreasing. Bulk bandwidth prices are decreasing. Prices should be going down, not up.

herf 7y ago
SSD/HD ratio likely went up. Backing up a laptop ten years ago with 128GB SSD wasn't as hard a job as backing up 1TB SSD, which is now rather cheap.
atYevP 7y ago
Yev here -> Interestingly, they aren't decreasing as quickly as they once were and that was part of the impetus for the increase. I touch on it in the article and we go further in detail in the original announcement, but it used to be that the data growth of the customer was more or less negated by drive capacity increasing and cost per gigabyte going down - but that trend has stymied recently.
mikeash 7y ago
Price per byte doesn’t really matter for an unlimited service. As that cost goes down, your users will have more and more data to store, in an amount that will basically cancel out.
- naniwaduni 7y ago
  Sounds like an argument against running an "unlimited" service.
  - gowld 7y ago
    Having a successful business for a decade and raising prices once in the smallest marketable unit of currency, sounds like an argument for doing exactly what they are doing with their "unlimited" service.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    How so?

InAnEmergency 7y ago

Or just follow Amy Hoy's advice[0] and only raise the price for new customers. They probably could have bumped their prices by more than $1/month (and sooner) if they had taken that approach. [0] https://stackingthebricks.com/one-weird-trick-to-raising-your-monthly-price-without-a-customer-revolt/ https://stackingthebricks.com/one-weird-trick-to-raising-you...

cwyers 7y ago

If it wasn't for this blog post, I'm not sure I'd know right now how much I'm paying for Backblaze, and it's very possible I will forget by my renewal date.

neximo64 7y ago

> you’ve been losing out in real terms because of inflation for years This is inaccurate. If you break down inflation into its constituents electronics, storage, transfers and cpu have gone down dramatically. An increase of 5 to 6 is 20%, which is far more than 10 years of inflation, even if you account for it being averaged. I don't know how I can read this as anything but spin. Good on ya guys for increasing prices but don't give it out as spin.

prawn 7y ago
And if the data stored by users has grown significantly in that time? I know the amount they store for me would've at least doubled since I started as a customer: core laptop drive, then I have 3-4 externals I regularly connect.
gowld 7y ago
You may have overlooked or forgotten that Backblaze charges a flat rate per client device, not per gigabyte stored or transferred.
mthoms 7y ago
That's only a small part of the picture. The amount of storage each customer occupies has probably gone up considerably in the same time frame. I know my HD size (and backup usage) has quadrupled over 10 years. And don't forget that the cost of salaries, rents, electricity, professional services, marketing and well, pretty much everything aside from bandwidth and hardware have gone up. In some cases rather dramatically.