Beachbody isn't an MLM. They sell workout programs (used to be dvds but have now moved to a subscription model). From personal experience, I can say that at least one of their programs - Tony Horton's P90X - is very good.
They have been historically [0], it looks like they only changed their model last October [1], a few months after Marc Suidan switched to Backblaze.
TFA even specifies this:
> Instead they hired Marc Suidan who joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI) - a publicly traded health and fitness company where he was CFO between May 2022 and August 2024 when the company was operating as a “multi-level marketing” company.
They WERE an MLM until they stopped being able to make money. There are good YouTubers out there dedicating time to getting people out of MLMs (some are basically cults). 99% of people in MLMs lose money.
If you think he is a good CFO I think you drank the coolaid.
Conversely, “they’re not an MLM, they sell a product.” Is a bullshit, non-defense statement. MLMs always have a product. That’s what keeps them from being Ponzi schemes.
A finer distinction might be between MLMs (where the multi-level part is very literal — everyone is being garnished by their upline and profiting from their downline), vs. flat marketing organizations that just give (centralized, corporate, one-time) recruitment bonuses to their salespeople.
Vector Marketing, for example — the company that sells Cutco knives door-to-door — might be incredibly scummy, sure. Their entire business model is to
1. talk college students into thinking they can make a continuous monthly profit by selling $800 knife sets (when really the profit is one-time at best, by tapping into each college student's family and friends — who are only sympathetic enough to buy the knives [if they even are], because it's their family/friend asking);
2. forcing those college students to "buy into" the company, purchasing a knife-set of their own to use in sales demos (which they can't return if they quit);
3. and also forcing those college students to recruit other college students on campus.
But, because every transaction is ultimately just lining Vector Marketing's pockets directly — without any revenue structure involving making more money as you recruit others whose sales "become your sales" — it's not Multi Level Marketing.
It's just sleazy.
(And yes, this is just me taking this opportunity to rant about Vector Marketing. I have half a Cutco knife set laying around, from when my college roommate attended a "job offer" and got essentially bullied into buying a set before they could leave. Every time I use it, I think of how tarnished the Cutco brand is by these awful tactics of Vector Marketing's practices. Which is a shame, because they're decent knives. But obviously not knives I'd ever recommend anyone buy, because I don't want to support a company that thinks it's a good idea to work with a company like Vector Marketing.)
Article says they're losing customers to Wasabi, but as far as I can see on a quick perusal of their website, Wasabi is just straight storage? For me, a lot of the benefit of Backblaze comes from a (mostly) good client solution that handles the automated backup. The backup history upsell is also great for someone (like me) whose travel patterns often mean going months without reliable internet.
I know I could use some open source stuff to get similar functionality, but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup as I would rolling my own crypto. Does Wasabi have some client solution that I'm missing?
By coincidence I just spent several hours today comparing exactly these two services (Wasabi vs B2) and even though I am familiar with Backblaze and have used it before, I went with Wasabi. It's basically the same price, has more regions, a very simple interface, and rather than having to manage both hot and cold storage Wasabi is cheap enough to just throw everything into hot.
The only downside I found is that they limit free egress to 100% of your storage (so if you store 1tb, you get 1tb egress). In practice I don't think this will be an issue for my use case.
So I'm an example of a person who this morning had almost never heard of Wasabi, knows Backlaze well, and after an hour or two of research I have completely switched over.
Isn't B2 cheaper than Wasabi? B2 is $6/TB while Wasabi is $6.99/TB. Why would you have to manage hot and cold storage with B2?
Wasabi also treats every object as having a minimum 90-day storage period. So if you upload something and delete it, it's still considered "stored" for billing purposes for that 90-day minimum.
B2 also gives you 3x storage as free transfer compared to 1x for Wasabi.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go with Wasabi, but the reasoning you've articulated doesn't seem to track.
Additionally, Wasabi bills you for a minimum of 1TB of active storage, which is $6.99/month. For my modest backup needs it is way cheaper to use any service that bills per GB.
>Article says they're losing customers to Wasabi, but as far as I can see on a quick perusal of their website, Wasabi is just straight storage?
That's addressed in the article:
>Since 2021, Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage segment revenue growth has outpaced its legacy Computer Backup segment. In Q4 2024, the company announced that its B2 Cloud Storage segment generated $17.1 million in revenue, surpassing its Computer Backup revenue of $16.7 million.
Even if Wasabi isn't a straight replacement for Backblaze's entire business, it's a replacement for its biggest and fastest growing segment.
how in the world do they only make $17.1 in revenue, everyone I know is on BackBlaze, even if they're only used by techy people I'm surprised they're not making $100m+/quarter.
Anecdotally most people, even "techy people" don't do actual backups. At best, they have icloud/google backup turned on for their phone, and upload important files are on dropbox/onedrive.
They're cheap (the reason many people use them), and the number of people we know that use them is ridiculously outsized compared to the general population, because we know people in the tech sphere.
You’re missing the point. Enterprise customers where they would presumably see the bulk of their profits is what they’re losing to wasabi. Commercial “unlimited backups” is not a wildly profitable business which is why basically every other competitor in the space either failed or intentionally exited the market segment.
Totally an aside but is Morpheus what happened to the Hindenburg Research guys after the founder of that stepped away? The site is eerily similar and the timing makes sense. I loved reading Hindenburg’s research.
I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage. This includes Backblaze. Yes, I recommend worrying about Backblaze and I’ve recommended worrying about it for a while.
Storage costs money. People love to dream up creative business models where your personal storage is subsidized by some other part of the business, but I think it’s just a matter of time before the business model changes. At the end of the day, there’s a massive gravitational pull that brings everything in line with market rates. These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion.
From another angle, in any long-term relationship with a vendor, you want the vendor to make money. We know that major cloud vendors do, or at least close enough, because they charge the same for small customers and big ones (or close enough). None of them offer unlimited data… or at least, not any more (most of them used to, but those parts of the business always get shut down).
"I recommend worrying about any service where you don’t pay a fee that scales with usage."
This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to develop.
Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests.
The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to keep you from using their product and to use as little of their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of incentives.
On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed) "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic "losing money but making up for it on volume".
Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time.
The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :(
> Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests.
I also think about all those cafés with free WiFi, where you buy a single coffee and take up a table for six hours while you browse Facebook and have your screenplay open in the background. I benefit, but the café doesn’t.
>These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion.
Are you talking about their B2 product or their backup SaaS? The former has "fee that scales with usage", and the latter probably has enough normal users (ie. not data hoarders backing up 50 TB on the $99/year plan that they're not losing money overall.
$99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The context here is someone talking about personal backups, not Backblaze’s broader offerings. We know the market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since they’ve converged somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to save money at Backblaze.
Cloud services often have a free tier or cheap tier to attract new customers. IMO, this is not it. This is a product. These people are not turning around and signing contracts with Backblaze at work. At least, not many.
So it could be that people are just using it below its limits, or it could be that it’s subsidized by other parts of the business. Overall P&L is irrelevant—you want to be able to explain this product as a profitable product, as some viable sales channel, or as marketing.
My recommendation is to buy storage products where the company is making money off you, or nearly.
The backup plan has no API access (you need to use B2 which is usage-billed), it’s for a single machine, and external drive data is lost after 30 days from last scan which makes it very inconvenient for anything other than.. backing up a computer’s hard drive. Nothing indicates misuse of this plan is causing elevated operating costs for them.
I believe they're public about the fact they have some users who back up hundreds of TBs and they're still willing to just deal with it to keep the flat price structure.
>$99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The context here is someone talking about personal backups, not Backblaze’s broader offerings. We know the market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since they’ve converged somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to save money at Backblaze.
So do the calculations? As I mentioned in another comment, their unit economics are sound, with them making more than 50% gross margin.
>So it could be that people are just using it below its limits
That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym chains operate on the assumption that most users won't use their services. There's no way that planet fitness can equip and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if everyone one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to get a planet fitness membership (assuming you'd actually go), or that they're at risk of going under.
Is this some kind of personal challenge? It’s arithmetic for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125/Gb-mo, ingress basically free, $99/yr÷(12mo/yr×$0.0125/Gb-mo)=660 Gb. Reasonable to ignore egress for backups—you may want to account for it, but it’s reasonable to ignore it. Do your own calculations if you have different assumptions.
That’s not hard. The numbers don’t have to be exact.
Maybe I just think it’s easy because I’ve run numbers like these for a living. Given X different storage configurations, under which conditions is configuration 1 cheaper than configurations 2 and 3?
> That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym chains operate on the assumption that most users won't use their services. There's no way that planet fitness can equip and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if everyone one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to get a planet fitness membership (assuming you'd actually go), or that they're at risk of going under.
The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move my data to a different provider, depending on how much data and what kind of rate limits. We’ve seen this before. People with data stuck in an “unlimited” storage service that’s shutting down, trying to transfer it but getting their egress throttled.
The economics of gyms are different because the cost is not only the membership, but also the time it takes you to get to the gym. Cloud services are a much more efficient market, which means the margins are much lower.
>Is this some kind of personal challenge? It’s arithmetic for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125/Gb-mo, ingress basically free, $99/yr÷(12mo/yr×$0.0125/Gb-mo)=660 Gb.
This includes AWS's margin, which could be quite handsome. Bandwidth costs for the top 3 hyperscalers have converged to around 9 cents per GB, but nobody seriously thinks that's anywhere close to to the actual cost of bandwidth, or that hetzner/ovh is going to go under because they're offering 1TB ($90) of bandwdith for their $5/month VPS.
Even taking the 660GB figure at face value, that's plausibly within the range of what I'd expect the average person to have backed up, especially when you consider that the pricing is per machine, and the standard desktop/laptop comes with around 500 GB of storage.
You've also failed to address my point about their gross margins. The reliability of their books have been questioned, but even the short report didn't accuse them of cooking that metric.
>The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move my data to a different provider, depending on how much data and what kind of rate limits. We’ve seen this before. People with data stuck in an “unlimited” storage service that’s shutting down, trying to transfer it but getting their egress throttled.
It's a backup service. It's not even trying to compare itself with the likes of dropbox or onedrive. You should have at the very least a second copy locally.
I meant the unit economics of their backup product, not the company as a whole. They made $69M in gross profit in 2024, with a gross margin of 55%. That turns into a lost only after subtracting R&D ($42M), sales and marketing ($44M), and G&A ($29M). Of course, those expenses can't be ignored in the context of a company that's set out to make money, but at least they're not selling $10 worth of storage for $5, like the OP implied.
I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is. The hyperscalers are able to get prices way cheaper with economies of scale and price models in a sustainable way.
When O365 launched, they were using spinning disk for exchange. The issue was that they stranded capacity because of the IOPS needs of exchange. So “free”, (low iops) SharePoint and OneDrive for business data utilized that “free” capacity.
"I’d make the exception for Google Drive, OneDrive and whatever the AWS one is."
No - no exceptions.
We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that providers (especially providers of critical services) have financial interests that align with our own interests.
I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they have to burn - if it makes financial sense to keep you from storing your backups you need to go elsewhere.
You’re missing the point. Those companies are providing extremely profitable services, of which data storage is a part. Office and Workspace are lines of business with 50-60% margins.
Non-nerds are going to screw up backups without good UI. If you want to pay by the drink, like I said, use the hyperscalers.
How do you test your backups? You do test your backups, right? Your other comment mentions using dropbox, but that's hardly a real backup solution, and you could easily run into a situation where you need to retrieve files beyond the 30 day window.
Glacier egress is less than it used to be, and you can use a combination of glacier + other storage classes using lifecycle rules.
I would personally be fine running tests on data that is recently backed up and only testing the data in glacier once or twice. Think about why you test backups in the first place—the main errors you’re trying to catch are problems like misconfiguration, backups not getting scheduled or not running, or not having access to your encryption keys. You can put your most recent backup in “infrequent access” and let older objects age out to glacier with lifecycle rules.
Glacier used to have really expensive retrieval costs. That’s now called “glacier deep archive” and as far as I know, major use cases are things like corporate recordkeeping / compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). The costumers for deep archive should be sophisticated customers.
I backup to Amazon Glacier S3 Deep Archive backed buckets. The price is only a little higher for a few TB than other providers, though egress fees in case of restore are a lot higher. That's a tradeoff I'm willing to make as I'd have two have two separate local NAS replicas corrupt or die before I need to rely on the Deep Archive.
For raw backup, I use GCP. Pricing is similar to AWS and the deep storage is easier to use.
For most regular people, I suggest Google Drive or OneDrive because you get the value add of the their ecosystem. With Google, Photos are good. With Microsoft, the Office+OneDrive subscription is a great value.
Storage is a fixed fee (space on a hard drive). It make money every month when it sits there and is used.
Bandwidth costs can seem like a lot more, but when you purchase a 10 gig fibre, you have unlimited data, up until the full speed of the 10 gig fibre, 24/7. That number in TB can be calculated.
Clouds massively mark up services. Ones that underprice can have the opposite problem.
I have heard good things about the Backblaze service itself, and appreciate the hard drive reviews they put out.
You should worry they'll increase the price and worry they'll delete your data if you don't pay the higher price. It's not necessary to worry they'll go out of business just because they are charging a fixed price. They'll raise the price long before going out of business.
Having your own NAS in the mix more and more is unavoidable.
On one side, the cloud is someone else's computer they will always charge more an more for it because customers have not learned the economics of cloud hosting and how profitable it is on the other end.
On the other side, a NAS is your storage computer, in a simplified home appliance form. Connect it to back up to any cloud you wish.
If the service isn’t making money consistently, I would worry about its long-term viability. This is basic commoditized storage they’re managing to screw up making a profit on, not some super-niche or brand-new product line.
It’s bits in a barn, and they’re not making rent. That’s worried me enough to re-evaluate my relationship with them, especially in light of this research.
They're not at risk of going bankrupt. This is more about confidence in the company to go anywhere that would help the share price.
The company is being plundered and run for the benefit of the exec team printing shares for themselves. Nobody should be buying shares expecting the price to rise.
It's one of two backups. The software is great. Dropbox level of just works. iDrive by comparison is cheaper but always errors and files it couldn't touch.
"Yeah do NOT do iDrive if you use git or care about symlinks, I learned the hard way. Backblaze doesn't backup symlinks either for that matter..."
Gosh, if only there were a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem you could do anything you wanted with ... maybe something built totally on open standards that could handle hardlinks and symlinks and such ?
> While Budman claimed that he wanted to avoid any appearance of trying to “time the market,” he appears to have done so nearly perfectly, as Backblaze’s shares crashed by as much as 26% intraday following the announcement and have continued to slide ever since.[5]
Doesn’t that seem like insider trading? I guess he can claim he didn’t know so and so was going to quit.
Not to say he’s innocent, but insiders can also trigger market crashes just by selling their stock. There are public records of substantial holdings by company insiders and while I don’t think they’re made available immediately, they are updated periodically and people can and do read into it.
That’s part of why they usually deputize a brokerage to periodically sell a fraction of their holdings at intervals.
It’s been a long while since I paid any attention to this but I do believe I saw at least a couple of instances of an insider triggering weakness in their stock just by increasing the rate of sale of their holdings.
To wit: Bill Gates did a bunch of press before starting his foundation to make it clear that him selling MS shares was not about concerns over MS’s future but that he needed a shitload of money for other pursuits.
And Warren Buffet would use many frontmen to slowly buy shares without triggering a buying frenzy. You can’t just buy or sell 3% of a company without causing drama.
It might depend on who you are. I think Backblaze is well known on here because they've been around for longer and their hard drive stats posts are well liked.
If you're a less technical CTO, Wasabi seems to do a lot more traditional marketing on things like sports games: https://ibb.co/21qNkM9b (NBA, NHL, Premier League soccer). I'm not saying that makes them better, but a lot of people with purchasing power are going to be seeing Wasabi around.
Wasabi has also been pushing value-add services on top of their storage with Wasabi AiR (https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage/wasabi-air). It's basically an AI-powered database of your content. If you're running a place generating lots of content, having a system automatically tag and make searchable all those images and videos is a really nice value-add. Being able to search for a video clip containing a specific person in your library junk pile of video can be nicely useful for a lot of organizations.
It could just be that different people get their brand awareness from different places.
Very happy with their B2 storage. Easy to use, works well, prices fine. I use it as a backup target for several of my Synology NAS's. I hope they stay in business
Can anyone recommend a decent Backblaze alternative in case things really go south? Not so much for storage but for the automated computer backups that I have Backblaze doing. I'm okay paying more than Backblaze's $9/month.
honestly I participated in the IPO then sold when it was up a bit - I had faith in their fundamentals as a business but they did not seem mature as a public company.
I don't know what the incentive would be for doing that. Could they use it to drive prices on HDDs lower somehow? I vaguely recall them being activist as far as quality.
Almost every cloud provider outside of Azure and GCP have an s3 compatible offering . S3 API is de-facto standard for object storage tooling
Cloudflare, scaleway, hetzner, OVH, Oracle, minio and dozens of others all have s3 compatible object stores
Most of them expect AWS have at least inter cloud transfer free (or discount Azure and GCP) being part of bandwidth alliance(BWA).
AWS S3 pricing is designed to keep you in the ecosystem , not be the cheapest, so tend to be costliest not cheapest unless your workload is archival.
For almost all non archival workloads egress costs will be on par or much higher than storage costs and AWS[1] charges a lot for any bandwidth.
AWS also makes migration really expensive so if you started with them, you are likely stuck as you would have to pay up to 10-12 months of cost to migrate out if you are on anything but the standard tier (cheaper the tiers higher the retrieval costs)
[1] All tier one providers have 10-20x b/w costs compared to tier two , however Azure and GCP discount for inter cloud transfers AWS does not
From the article (TLDR: the author has a financial interest in seeing their stock decline)
> Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE). Morpheus Research holds short positions in BLZE, and Morpheus Research may profit from short positions held by others. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all readers to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
Sure, but I’d more worried that the founders and management seem like they are short. The CEO left, announced a big stock sale, cancelled it, then dumped a bunch coincidentally when the CFO left (but before disclosure). Then the company hired an MLM CFO.
Oh, and the finance employees refused to sign off on the books and a few are suing the company.
But this is a hit piece. For any hit piece, I think it’s important for readers to know the motivations of the author, regardless of the validity of the claims.
That's basically how every short report works. Finding corporate malfeasance and writing a report costs money, and Backblaze isn't famous enough that journalists from the new york times or propublica would go after them. So the only people with incentive to expose such corporate malfeasance are short sellers.
And contrary to popular opinion, Taleb thinks that you should put more weight on such opinions, because they have skin in the game and are willing to back their beliefs with money. Short selling is not risk free, if they are wrong, they will get burned.
That is how short selling works. Do lots of research, find some fatal flaw in a business model that everyone else has missed, and put money on the position. The final step is you have to advertise your findings, otherwise you are sitting on secret knowledge which the market will not price appropriately.
I think that’s pretty negligible. Backblaze’s problem (at least a year ago when I last read the earnings) is that they were investing a ton of money in r&d without getting equivalent returns in revenue, and also burning lots of money on ops. I suspect the unit economics of the underlying storage are fine.
Backblaze uses erasure encoding, which is currently the best and most efficient way to do storage. It's how every major object storage platform works.
The very quick high level explanation is that in storage you talk about "stretch factor". For every byte of file, how many bytes do you have to store to get the desired durability. If your approach to durability is you make 3 copies, that's a 3x stretch factor. Assuming you're smart, you'll have these spread across different servers, or at least different hard disks, so you'd be able to tolerate the loss of 2 servers.
With erasure encoding you apply a mathematical transformation to the incoming object and shard it up. Out of those shards you need to retrieve a certain number to be able to reproduce the original object. The number of shards you produce and how many you need to recreate the original are configurable. Let's say it shards to 12, and you need 9 to recreate. The amount of storage that takes up is the ratio 9:12, so that's a 1.3x. For every byte that comes in, you need to store just 1.3x bytes.
As before you'd scatter them across 12 shards and only needing any 9 means you can tolerate losing 3 hard disks (servers?) and still be able to retrieve the original object. That's better durability despite taking up 2.7x less storage.
The drawback is that to retrieve the object, you have to fetch shards from 9 different locations and apply the transformation to recreate the original object, which adds a small bit of latency, but it's largely negligible these days. The cost of extra servers for your retrieval layer is significantly less than a storage server, and you wouldn't need anywhere near the same number as you'd otherwise need for storage.
The underlying file system doesn't really have any appreciable impact under those circumstances. I'd argue ZFS is probably even worse, because you're spending more resources on overhead. You want something as fast and lightweight as possible. Your fixity checks will catch any degradation in shards, and recreating shards in the case of failure is pretty cheap.
> It's how every major object storage platform works.
Very interesting. Could you name a few, am curious. I would be happy if erasure codes are actually being used commercially.
What I find interesting is the interaction of compression and durability -- if you lose a few compressed bytes to reconstruction error, you lose a little more than a few. Seems right up rate-distortion alley.
That I know of (and is public so I'm not breaching any NDA) AWS S3[1], Azure[2], GCP[3], Backblaze[4], Facebook's storage layer uses it[5][6], and Oracle Cloud's Object Storage Platform[7].
The economies of scale mean that you really have to have something like erasure encoding in place to operate at large scale. The biggest single cost for cloud providers is the per-rack operational costs, so keeping the number of racks down is critical.
Ceph has a very stable EC feature. And lot of companies use Ceph as a storage backend. Unfortunately I cannot find any straightforward statement about a commercial offering, but I would bet that DreamHost's DreamObjects does use it.
While it's not "commercial", but CERN uses it and many other institutions.
XFS or ext2 (or 3 or 4 wo journal), without LVM or mdraid.
There's no point to adding RAID at the hardware or OS level for object storage boxes when redundancy exists at the application level. A drive with too many errors will be marked "dead" and just spun down and ignored.
Metadata servers OTOH tend to be engineered to be much more reliable beasts.
Can't seems to find anything specific about Wasabi uses ZFS on Google. And Wasabi doesn't change you on egress. So I guess they are similar in terms of pricing.
Although B2 seems to be way more popular on HN. I rarely see Wasabi here.
There is the testimonial on Klara Systems’ website:
"The developers at Klara Inc. have been outstanding in helping Wasabi resolve ZFS issues and improve performance. Their understanding of ZFS internals is unmatched anywhere in the industry" - Jeff Flowers, CTO, Wasabi Technologies
Book price is $6.99/TB for Wasabi vs $6/TB for Backblaze. Wasabi charges 90 days minimum for storage, and egress bandwidth is limited (honor system) to your total monthly data storage amount.
Wasabi also requires you to pay for a minimum of 1TB, whereas B2 charges per GB. That doesn't really matter for a company using a ton of storage, but it does for my personal use case of a few tens of GB.
You won’t, however, be able to serve most e.g. media files or binaries this way, nor serve to clients like mobile apps, while staying within the bounds of Cloudflare’s terms for their free and “self-serve” tier paid accounts.
(Unless something’s changed since the last time I checked)
I suspect it does. When I was evaluating Wasabi years ago, the sales engineers were very interested in knowing what specific kind of data we had and how compressible it was. So my guess (pure speculation) at the time was they use ZFS compression internally but charge customers for the uncompressed size.
If they care about compression at the ZFS level, that means your file is going to be visible to anyone able to log in to the server, because they're relying on (at best) encryption at rest. That's not a great security model for a storage service. You don't want anyone to be able to log in to a server and see your actual files unencrypted.
If they're going to compress/decompress, ideally you'd want them to have that at the point of ingestion, then encrypted, and then store that on the target drive.
That way you can put very strong controls (audit, architecture, software etc) around your encryption and decryption, and be at reduced risk from someone getting access to storage servers.
> Instead, Backblaze’s new CFO, Marc Suidan, joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI), a multi-level marketing company
eek
TFA even specifies this:
> Instead they hired Marc Suidan who joined from Beachbody (NYSE: BODI) - a publicly traded health and fitness company where he was CFO between May 2022 and August 2024 when the company was operating as a “multi-level marketing” company.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2011/01/31/beachbody-grows-exponentiall...
[1] https://nypost.com/2024/10/01/business/beachbody-lays-off-th...
If you think he is a good CFO I think you drank the coolaid.
https://marencrowley.com/podcast/the-demise-of-the-beachbody...
And then promoting them also gives strong mlm vibes.
So I would bet more money on them being an mlm after reading your comment than before
"Uh, what?? Air isn't an MLM, it's just the thing we breath. We all need it to live."
"Huh, I guess air is an MLM after all. Wild."
Vector Marketing, for example — the company that sells Cutco knives door-to-door — might be incredibly scummy, sure. Their entire business model is to
1. talk college students into thinking they can make a continuous monthly profit by selling $800 knife sets (when really the profit is one-time at best, by tapping into each college student's family and friends — who are only sympathetic enough to buy the knives [if they even are], because it's their family/friend asking);
2. forcing those college students to "buy into" the company, purchasing a knife-set of their own to use in sales demos (which they can't return if they quit);
3. and also forcing those college students to recruit other college students on campus.
But, because every transaction is ultimately just lining Vector Marketing's pockets directly — without any revenue structure involving making more money as you recruit others whose sales "become your sales" — it's not Multi Level Marketing.
It's just sleazy.
(And yes, this is just me taking this opportunity to rant about Vector Marketing. I have half a Cutco knife set laying around, from when my college roommate attended a "job offer" and got essentially bullied into buying a set before they could leave. Every time I use it, I think of how tarnished the Cutco brand is by these awful tactics of Vector Marketing's practices. Which is a shame, because they're decent knives. But obviously not knives I'd ever recommend anyone buy, because I don't want to support a company that thinks it's a good idea to work with a company like Vector Marketing.)
I know I could use some open source stuff to get similar functionality, but I feel almost as nervous rolling my own backup as I would rolling my own crypto. Does Wasabi have some client solution that I'm missing?
The only downside I found is that they limit free egress to 100% of your storage (so if you store 1tb, you get 1tb egress). In practice I don't think this will be an issue for my use case.
So I'm an example of a person who this morning had almost never heard of Wasabi, knows Backlaze well, and after an hour or two of research I have completely switched over.
Wasabi also treats every object as having a minimum 90-day storage period. So if you upload something and delete it, it's still considered "stored" for billing purposes for that 90-day minimum.
B2 also gives you 3x storage as free transfer compared to 1x for Wasabi.
I'm not saying you shouldn't go with Wasabi, but the reasoning you've articulated doesn't seem to track.
https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq
That's addressed in the article:
>Since 2021, Backblaze’s B2 Cloud Storage segment revenue growth has outpaced its legacy Computer Backup segment. In Q4 2024, the company announced that its B2 Cloud Storage segment generated $17.1 million in revenue, surpassing its Computer Backup revenue of $16.7 million.
Even if Wasabi isn't a straight replacement for Backblaze's entire business, it's a replacement for its biggest and fastest growing segment.
I know nobody who use them, so it all balances itself.
If they don’t have enterprises and people storing large amounts of data...
Is there a Restic frontend for Windows that you'd be comfortable setting up a family member with?
Storage costs money. People love to dream up creative business models where your personal storage is subsidized by some other part of the business, but I think it’s just a matter of time before the business model changes. At the end of the day, there’s a massive gravitational pull that brings everything in line with market rates. These days, I think we have a pretty good idea of what market rates are for cloud storage. Anything less than market rates should be viewed with suspicion.
From another angle, in any long-term relationship with a vendor, you want the vendor to make money. We know that major cloud vendors do, or at least close enough, because they charge the same for small customers and big ones (or close enough). None of them offer unlimited data… or at least, not any more (most of them used to, but those parts of the business always get shut down).
This is the issue and it is a heuristic that people need to develop.
Your provider especially your backups provider needs to have interests that are aligned with your interests.
The non-B2 portion of Backblaze has a financial incentive to keep you from using their product and to use as little of their space as possible. This is a bad, misaligned set of incentives.
On the B2 side, all of our suspicions about the (well timed) "me too" IPO have been confirmed with each and every quarterly report showing increased debt load and the classic "losing money but making up for it on volume".
Now that money isn't free anymore it's just a matter of time.
The sad part is they don't use standard, commodity JBOD enclosures so there won't even be anything useful in the fire sale :(
I also think about all those cafés with free WiFi, where you buy a single coffee and take up a table for six hours while you browse Facebook and have your screenplay open in the background. I benefit, but the café doesn’t.
Are you talking about their B2 product or their backup SaaS? The former has "fee that scales with usage", and the latter probably has enough normal users (ie. not data hoarders backing up 50 TB on the $99/year plan that they're not losing money overall.
$99/year with no limits on data, as far as I can tell. The context here is someone talking about personal backups, not Backblaze’s broader offerings. We know the market rates for cloud storage, more or less, since they’ve converged somewhat, across the industry. This makes it easy to calculate what kind of usage patterns would lead someone to save money at Backblaze.
Cloud services often have a free tier or cheap tier to attract new customers. IMO, this is not it. This is a product. These people are not turning around and signing contracts with Backblaze at work. At least, not many.
So it could be that people are just using it below its limits, or it could be that it’s subsidized by other parts of the business. Overall P&L is irrelevant—you want to be able to explain this product as a profitable product, as some viable sales channel, or as marketing.
My recommendation is to buy storage products where the company is making money off you, or nearly.
So do the calculations? As I mentioned in another comment, their unit economics are sound, with them making more than 50% gross margin.
>So it could be that people are just using it below its limits
That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym chains operate on the assumption that most users won't use their services. There's no way that planet fitness can equip and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if everyone one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to get a planet fitness membership (assuming you'd actually go), or that they're at risk of going under.
Is this some kind of personal challenge? It’s arithmetic for chrissakes, not calculus. S3 IA $0.0125/Gb-mo, ingress basically free, $99/yr÷(12mo/yr×$0.0125/Gb-mo)=660 Gb. Reasonable to ignore egress for backups—you may want to account for it, but it’s reasonable to ignore it. Do your own calculations if you have different assumptions.
That’s not hard. The numbers don’t have to be exact.
Maybe I just think it’s easy because I’ve run numbers like these for a living. Given X different storage configurations, under which conditions is configuration 1 cheaper than configurations 2 and 3?
> That's how many businesses work. Many low end gym chains operate on the assumption that most users won't use their services. There's no way that planet fitness can equip and operate a gym for $10/month per member, if everyone one of them went regularly. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea to get a planet fitness membership (assuming you'd actually go), or that they're at risk of going under.
The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move my data to a different provider, depending on how much data and what kind of rate limits. We’ve seen this before. People with data stuck in an “unlimited” storage service that’s shutting down, trying to transfer it but getting their egress throttled.
The economics of gyms are different because the cost is not only the membership, but also the time it takes you to get to the gym. Cloud services are a much more efficient market, which means the margins are much lower.
This includes AWS's margin, which could be quite handsome. Bandwidth costs for the top 3 hyperscalers have converged to around 9 cents per GB, but nobody seriously thinks that's anywhere close to to the actual cost of bandwidth, or that hetzner/ovh is going to go under because they're offering 1TB ($90) of bandwdith for their $5/month VPS.
Even taking the 660GB figure at face value, that's plausibly within the range of what I'd expect the average person to have backed up, especially when you consider that the pricing is per machine, and the standard desktop/laptop comes with around 500 GB of storage.
You've also failed to address my point about their gross margins. The reliability of their books have been questioned, but even the short report didn't accuse them of cooking that metric.
>The gym closes I can buy a different gym membership. My cloud storage service closes, it may be difficult to move my data to a different provider, depending on how much data and what kind of rate limits. We’ve seen this before. People with data stuck in an “unlimited” storage service that’s shutting down, trying to transfer it but getting their egress throttled.
It's a backup service. It's not even trying to compare itself with the likes of dropbox or onedrive. You should have at the very least a second copy locally.
When O365 launched, they were using spinning disk for exchange. The issue was that they stranded capacity because of the IOPS needs of exchange. So “free”, (low iops) SharePoint and OneDrive for business data utilized that “free” capacity.
No - no exceptions.
We must, as sophisticated 21st century actors, insist that providers (especially providers of critical services) have financial interests that align with our own interests.
I don't care how big the parent is or how much money they have to burn - if it makes financial sense to keep you from storing your backups you need to go elsewhere.
Non-nerds are going to screw up backups without good UI. If you want to pay by the drink, like I said, use the hyperscalers.
If it was aligned with economies of scale, customers would get more storage for the same price every year.
We don't hear about cloud prices coming down that often.
How do you test your backups? You do test your backups, right? Your other comment mentions using dropbox, but that's hardly a real backup solution, and you could easily run into a situation where you need to retrieve files beyond the 30 day window.
And it’s such a good thing to remind people of. You don’t manage a backup service. Nobody cares about backups.
People care about restores.
I would personally be fine running tests on data that is recently backed up and only testing the data in glacier once or twice. Think about why you test backups in the first place—the main errors you’re trying to catch are problems like misconfiguration, backups not getting scheduled or not running, or not having access to your encryption keys. You can put your most recent backup in “infrequent access” and let older objects age out to glacier with lifecycle rules.
Glacier used to have really expensive retrieval costs. That’s now called “glacier deep archive” and as far as I know, major use cases are things like corporate recordkeeping / compliance (e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley). The costumers for deep archive should be sophisticated customers.
For most regular people, I suggest Google Drive or OneDrive because you get the value add of the their ecosystem. With Google, Photos are good. With Microsoft, the Office+OneDrive subscription is a great value.
Bandwidth costs can seem like a lot more, but when you purchase a 10 gig fibre, you have unlimited data, up until the full speed of the 10 gig fibre, 24/7. That number in TB can be calculated.
Clouds massively mark up services. Ones that underprice can have the opposite problem.
I have heard good things about the Backblaze service itself, and appreciate the hard drive reviews they put out.
On one side, the cloud is someone else's computer they will always charge more an more for it because customers have not learned the economics of cloud hosting and how profitable it is on the other end.
On the other side, a NAS is your storage computer, in a simplified home appliance form. Connect it to back up to any cloud you wish.
It’s bits in a barn, and they’re not making rent. That’s worried me enough to re-evaluate my relationship with them, especially in light of this research.
The company is being plundered and run for the benefit of the exec team printing shares for themselves. Nobody should be buying shares expecting the price to rise.
Gosh, if only there were a cloud storage provider that gave you an empty UNIX filesystem you could do anything you wanted with ... maybe something built totally on open standards that could handle hardlinks and symlinks and such ?
If only ...
It’s not the same service as backblaze’s client but it does everything I need, with dedupe
Doesn’t that seem like insider trading? I guess he can claim he didn’t know so and so was going to quit.
That’s part of why they usually deputize a brokerage to periodically sell a fraction of their holdings at intervals.
It’s been a long while since I paid any attention to this but I do believe I saw at least a couple of instances of an insider triggering weakness in their stock just by increasing the rate of sale of their holdings.
And Warren Buffet would use many frontmen to slowly buy shares without triggering a buying frenzy. You can’t just buy or sell 3% of a company without causing drama.
But… are there securities laws in this era where policy decisions are timed to pump/dump the lowest?
If you're a less technical CTO, Wasabi seems to do a lot more traditional marketing on things like sports games: https://ibb.co/21qNkM9b (NBA, NHL, Premier League soccer). I'm not saying that makes them better, but a lot of people with purchasing power are going to be seeing Wasabi around.
Wasabi has also been pushing value-add services on top of their storage with Wasabi AiR (https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage/wasabi-air). It's basically an AI-powered database of your content. If you're running a place generating lots of content, having a system automatically tag and make searchable all those images and videos is a really nice value-add. Being able to search for a video clip containing a specific person in your library junk pile of video can be nicely useful for a lot of organizations.
It could just be that different people get their brand awareness from different places.
Small data, or low risk tolerance: Tarsnap
honestly I participated in the IPO then sold when it was up a bit - I had faith in their fundamentals as a business but they did not seem mature as a public company.
- Wasabi
- idrive
Who else?
Cloudflare, scaleway, hetzner, OVH, Oracle, minio and dozens of others all have s3 compatible object stores
Most of them expect AWS have at least inter cloud transfer free (or discount Azure and GCP) being part of bandwidth alliance(BWA).
AWS S3 pricing is designed to keep you in the ecosystem , not be the cheapest, so tend to be costliest not cheapest unless your workload is archival.
For almost all non archival workloads egress costs will be on par or much higher than storage costs and AWS[1] charges a lot for any bandwidth.
AWS also makes migration really expensive so if you started with them, you are likely stuck as you would have to pay up to 10-12 months of cost to migrate out if you are on anything but the standard tier (cheaper the tiers higher the retrieval costs)
[1] All tier one providers have 10-20x b/w costs compared to tier two , however Azure and GCP discount for inter cloud transfers AWS does not
https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
> Initial Disclosure: After extensive research, we believe the evidence justifies a short position in shares of Backblaze (NASDAQ: BLZE). Morpheus Research holds short positions in BLZE, and Morpheus Research may profit from short positions held by others. This report represents our opinion, and we encourage all readers to do their own due diligence. Please see our full disclaimer at the bottom of the report.
Oh, and the finance employees refused to sign off on the books and a few are suing the company.
It sucks, but Backblaze is cooked.
But this is a hit piece. For any hit piece, I think it’s important for readers to know the motivations of the author, regardless of the validity of the claims.
(At least they disclose it at the bottom, but it should be in the title.)
this is activist short seller report/investigation, some of the points made:
- never been profitable
- execs selling aggressively
- loosing customers to Wasabi
- accused of cooking the books
- being sued by former execs for anti whistleblower/wrongful termination
- execs leaving
The very quick high level explanation is that in storage you talk about "stretch factor". For every byte of file, how many bytes do you have to store to get the desired durability. If your approach to durability is you make 3 copies, that's a 3x stretch factor. Assuming you're smart, you'll have these spread across different servers, or at least different hard disks, so you'd be able to tolerate the loss of 2 servers.
With erasure encoding you apply a mathematical transformation to the incoming object and shard it up. Out of those shards you need to retrieve a certain number to be able to reproduce the original object. The number of shards you produce and how many you need to recreate the original are configurable. Let's say it shards to 12, and you need 9 to recreate. The amount of storage that takes up is the ratio 9:12, so that's a 1.3x. For every byte that comes in, you need to store just 1.3x bytes.
As before you'd scatter them across 12 shards and only needing any 9 means you can tolerate losing 3 hard disks (servers?) and still be able to retrieve the original object. That's better durability despite taking up 2.7x less storage.
The drawback is that to retrieve the object, you have to fetch shards from 9 different locations and apply the transformation to recreate the original object, which adds a small bit of latency, but it's largely negligible these days. The cost of extra servers for your retrieval layer is significantly less than a storage server, and you wouldn't need anywhere near the same number as you'd otherwise need for storage.
The underlying file system doesn't really have any appreciable impact under those circumstances. I'd argue ZFS is probably even worse, because you're spending more resources on overhead. You want something as fast and lightweight as possible. Your fixity checks will catch any degradation in shards, and recreating shards in the case of failure is pretty cheap.
Very interesting. Could you name a few, am curious. I would be happy if erasure codes are actually being used commercially.
What I find interesting is the interaction of compression and durability -- if you lose a few compressed bytes to reconstruction error, you lose a little more than a few. Seems right up rate-distortion alley.
The economies of scale mean that you really have to have something like erasure encoding in place to operate at large scale. The biggest single cost for cloud providers is the per-rack operational costs, so keeping the number of racks down is critical.
[1]https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/Summits/reinvent2022/STG203_...
[2]https://www.usenix.org/system/files/conference/atc12/atc12-f...
[3]https://cloud.google.com/storage/docs/availability-durabilit...
[4]https://www.backblaze.com/blog/reed-solomon/
[5]https://www.usenix.org/conference/hotstorage13/workshop-prog...
[6]https://research.facebook.com/publications/a-hitchhikers-gui... they even do some interesting things with erasure encoding and HDFS
[7] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/post/first-pri...
While it's not "commercial", but CERN uses it and many other institutions.
https://indico.cern.ch/event/941278/contributions/4104604/at... --- 50PB
...
ah, okay, finally an AWS S3 presentation that mentions EC :)
https://d1.awsstatic.com/events/Summits/reinvent2022/STG203_...
XFS or ext2 (or 3 or 4 wo journal), without LVM or mdraid.
There's no point to adding RAID at the hardware or OS level for object storage boxes when redundancy exists at the application level. A drive with too many errors will be marked "dead" and just spun down and ignored.
Metadata servers OTOH tend to be engineered to be much more reliable beasts.
Can't seems to find anything specific about Wasabi uses ZFS on Google. And Wasabi doesn't change you on egress. So I guess they are similar in terms of pricing.
Although B2 seems to be way more popular on HN. I rarely see Wasabi here.
"The developers at Klara Inc. have been outstanding in helping Wasabi resolve ZFS issues and improve performance. Their understanding of ZFS internals is unmatched anywhere in the industry" - Jeff Flowers, CTO, Wasabi Technologies
https://klarasystems.com/
You could also search the OpenZFS repository for commits with the word Wasabi in them.
Wasabi only allows as much egress as the amount of data you're storing and I don't think you can even pay for more: https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq#free-egress-policy.
There's a number of CDNS that participate in zero egress.
https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/wasabi/jobs/4615087008
(Unless something’s changed since the last time I checked)
EDIT: OP is correct for CDN but if you use R2 even as a transparent copy from another S3 like provider it is allowed [1]
[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/updated-tos/
If they're going to compress/decompress, ideally you'd want them to have that at the point of ingestion, then encrypted, and then store that on the target drive.
That way you can put very strong controls (audit, architecture, software etc) around your encryption and decryption, and be at reduced risk from someone getting access to storage servers.