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I pay BackBlaze $7/mo to store 10TB. I feel bad about it, because they definitely don't make any money off me, and I imagine that's true for a lot of their top

• sltkr 5y ago
  Why do you assume they make no money off that? A 10TB HDD costs about $250. At $7/month, they earn that back in 3 years, way below the mean time to failure. Of course there's overhead too, but a lot of that goes down with scale, so I'm sure they're happy with your business.
  • Dylan16807 5y ago
    Well here is what they said two years ago: A 9 TByte backup costs Backblaze about $35/month to provide in raw storage costs (electricity, rent for where to store the drives, etc), and that doesn't include the extra money we need to employ "G&A" people (General and Administrative) I'm not sure why it's quite that high, but 1/60th of a server is another $150 and 1/60th of keeping that server housed and powered is going to eat another chunk of that $7 monthly fee. And then add another 20% to all the costs to account for the capacity spent on parity.
• Semaphor 5y ago
  Then there are users like me, 1.6TB backed up ;)
• systemvoltage 5y ago
  Why? If you total your car, do you feel bad that the insurance company paid $35k for a brand new car? Surely, you have not paid $35k in premiums. Don't ever feel bad for businesses that advertise and then you happen to use the product as intended. I think of these free-pooling companies in a similar vien as insurance firms. Some customers are very profitable and some are not. But they did the ROI for marketing it as "Unlimited" which brings new customers (again some profitable and others not so much). There is probably a regression equation that models profitability of such a business.