Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > So how did they manage to get rid of those hidden costs? Or is the new S3 compatible API more expensive? The new S3 compati

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze. > So how did they manage to get rid of those hidden costs? Or is the new S3 compatible API more expensive? The new S3 compatible APIs are the same cost as the original native B2 APIs. I'm the author of that original blog post, and we were able to get rid of SOME of the internal costs, but in the end we ate the cost of the load balancer. Internally I voted that we externalize that cost, but it's in the spirit of our "no-sales-friction" pricing model to get rid of decision points for customers and just let them get their stuff done. The internal math is that we believe the additional storage that (hopefully) will result from supporting the S3 API will help make up the cost of the upload balancers. It eats into our margin, but not by enough to justify a "friction pain point" that might reduce sales as customers struggle to decide which API to use. When you do the math over thousands of customers, we make the vast majority of money simply from renting the storage. Many many many customers upload things to Backblaze, and let them sit for long enough, that the cost of the load balancers becomes pretty small as a percentage. One of our goals of the pricing of Backblaze Personal Backup (flat fee of $6/month regardless of how much data you backup) and not charging much for transactions is we aren't trying to nickle and dime customers. We just want to make our margin and provide a solid service that makes customers happy.