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 transfer

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.