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Not really a fair comparison. Backblaze doesn't thumbnail, index, transcode, compress, collage and animate, or run AI models on your data (e.g., for face/object
by zeroxfe 6y ago
Not really a fair comparison. Backblaze doesn't thumbnail, index, transcode, compress, collage and animate, or run AI models on your data (e.g., for face/object detection, gene.) Running all that for 28 billion photos a month costs a lot of money. (And that excludes all the engineering cost of building front ends, android apps, integrations, etc.)
- choppaface 6y agoAll the software infra and processing was built years ago for Google Plus, so the ongoing engineering costs are minimal. The compute might be more than Backblaze, but it's predictable (the majority happens on upload) and it's a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of daily search indexing, YouTube, etc. The costly thing for Google is storage and bandwidth to the storage (since it's hard to predict what can be kept cold-- but recognizing faces and objects can help). And those costs, as we see, are a drop in the bucket for Google. That's why I conjecture this move is much more about marketing and company culture and less about real technical constraints.
- choppaface 6y agoAnother datapoint: Flickr Pro is as low as $5/month for unlimited full-res photos. So Google Photos (beyond 15GB) at ~$1.6/month would get to undercut Flickr yet won't even offer unlimited space.