"What you have right here and right now is a public relations disaster. Trust in your brand has been damaged. It cannot be repaired by you providing minimal information."
I'm not sure that's true.
There are a number of barely-technical subreddits, typically centered around Plex or some flavor of bittorrent, that consist of an all-day-every-day request for "as much cloud storage as possible for the lowest possible cost and please say it's free".
These are not HN readers. It's as if they attained consciousness two minutes ago and one minute ago they decided they needed cloud storage.
This is the audience these kind of analytical tools are geared toward and I don't think this changes their "engagement" or their "convertibility" or their "lifetime value".
The real information here is that in 2021, and in conjunction with a much more sophisticated product offering (B2), Backblaze is very aggressively pursuing flat-rate, loss-leaders who can be influenced and targeted by facebook.
I understand that is a lower price than your own product, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're losing money.
You seem to be implying that their covering the losses on storage by selling customer data. Is that correct? In which case, would you like to be a bit more specific and explicit?
No - I am drawing a distinction between B2 and the "unlimited" plans that I assume to be loss-leaders.
Aren't those the kind of users you can monetize through social media "engagement" ? I don't think it's the B2 users... which class of users had data leaks ?
The floor on keeping HDDs spinning is about $4/spindle-month (assuming $0.60/KWh total cost in a data center) and 150 drives probably eats more power than the rest of the enclosure and a rack switch, so call it $6/spindle, and Backblaze aims at $30/TB upfront cost and seems to have only >=4TB spindles so there's plenty of room for unlimited plan users to keep making them money at $6/month. I, as a fairly nerdy person, only need to back up a hair under 2TB at this point, and I assume I'm past the 90th percentile of bb's unlimited customer distribution and they would still make money off of me if I kept 2TB there >15 months on the unlimited plan ($30 / ($5 - ($6/spindle * spindle/4TB * 2TB) month).
I think their best advertising for B2 is the quarterly hard disk stats, it's a shame they made this mistake with the fb tracker; I can't store data in my garage as cheaply as they do. ~100W continuous for a box with drives at $0.30/KWh (CA PG&E) is $20/month.
I'm jumping through the hoop of s3backer to turn B2 into a vdev for a zpool with encrypted datasets; I'll have to try something similar on rsync.net with sshfs.
But just to be clear: is your claim that the unlimited storage consumer backup plan is a loss leader, and they cover their costs by selling the backed up data (or metadata) to the likes of Facebook?
Then I genuinely have no idea what your goal here is. What is your claim?
It seems like you're trying to waft a very serious claim in the direction of competitor, but you're being very careful to avoid saying anything explicit or specific.
My long held contention - which I have repeated in this forum many times and wrote into a formalized blog posting 12 years ago[1] - is that flat rate data service offerings pit the provider against the consumer in an antagonistic relationship.
Which is to say: the provider has a vested interest in minimizing your usage and incurred costs which runs directly counter to the consumers desire to use as many resources as possible. This antagonistic relationship leads to all manner of dysfunctions and bad patterns.
When I see serious businesses "enhancing engagement" with facebook pixels, I think that perhaps that is one more side effect of that antagonistic provider/customer relationship.
HOWEVER, it turns out that the tracking code was on the B2 side of things - the people-paying-money side of things - and not on the who-will-let-me-upload-movies-forever side of things.
So my sense was wrong.
I was suggesting that this might not be as brand damaging - and trust eroding - as my parent suggested. After all, both sides of that unlimited flat rate storage relationship are pretty dysfunctional. If this was on the B2 side of things then I take it back - it's probably quite damaging.
Regardless: I stand by my disdain - and continue to warn against - flat-rate service offerings. You want your provider to happily enable you to use more of their product.
I'm not sure that's true.
There are a number of barely-technical subreddits, typically centered around Plex or some flavor of bittorrent, that consist of an all-day-every-day request for "as much cloud storage as possible for the lowest possible cost and please say it's free".
These are not HN readers. It's as if they attained consciousness two minutes ago and one minute ago they decided they needed cloud storage.
This is the audience these kind of analytical tools are geared toward and I don't think this changes their "engagement" or their "convertibility" or their "lifetime value".
The real information here is that in 2021, and in conjunction with a much more sophisticated product offering (B2), Backblaze is very aggressively pursuing flat-rate, loss-leaders who can be influenced and targeted by facebook.
Draw what conclusions from that you will.