Yev from Backblaze here -> When we first started producing the pods, we wanted to do two things: 1) provide unlimited backup 2) provide it for $5/month. We did

Yev from Backblaze here -> When we first started producing the pods, we wanted to do two things: 1) provide unlimited backup 2) provide it for $5/month. We did the math at the time and found that for $5/month you'd be able to store about 30GB a year on Amazon S3 (at the time it was about $0.15/gb). So we needed to create our own solution to this problem and designed storage pod 1.0, which provided 67 terabytes for about $7500. We figured the average person would store more than 30GB of data so the Amazon route wouldn't work. Ours did and continues to, based on a variety of factors but the main one being, as Amazon's costs decrease, so do ours (except for the whole Thailand thing...https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze_drive_farming/ and https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-and-1m-later/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/farming-hard-drives-2-years-a...). Plus it's kind of nice controlling your own destiny!