Just when you think AI isn't ruining something, it's ruining something.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2026
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Enshittification strikes again.
What is an “AI storage service”?
Does that mean you just store your info in AI weights/contexts and hope it can regenerate an approximation of what you put in?
It's s3 compatible storage (b2) you sell to companies using AI for twice as much.
b2 storage is $6/Tb/mo, AI storage is b2 storage at $15/Tb/mo.
It’s like selling special gold shovels during a gold rush that are better at shoveling gold.
It's like the wedding or funeral tax, where all items cost extra for no reason, other than exploitation.
And white components. And baby food.
And luxury car parts, which are more often than not from ordinary cars.
My VW is running Bugatti parts, for example.
The AI storage offers unlimited free egress, whereas the regular storage does not.
I assume it's where the AI companies store the stolen data used to train their LLMs.
Oh god, i know thats not possible and here come the startups to pitch it.
If you aren’t running it yourself, you’ll always be held hostage by toxic companies!
Time and time again, from account closures to account locking… if you value anything, you should really look at self hosting it. Yes it’s a learning curve, but now is actually a good time because you have claude to help, but don’t expect that to last!
I am and will only ever use the free tier of claude but even that is actually pretty useful. Just don’t reuse the same chat, create new ones, delete ones no longer needed and you rarely hit the usage limits.
I’ve used claude to get my own AI server running on a low power beelink PC and while i’m still learning, it runs pretty well so Imcan now bounce between my own AI, to claude for the few issues I can’t solve.
I agree in general about self-hosting, but backup seems like a special case. Where do you back up your self-hosted data? An offsite copy of the backup is needed, and it should be automatic. For most people (who only have one site, their home) that's not easy to arrange except through a cloud backup service.
In my case I work with a family member in another city. We connect via VPN (tailscale works well too if you prefer that) and push the data we want to backup. Something like nextcloud could be used too, although a regular file explorer works just fine once you're connected.
Now mind you it's mostly family photos, so not petabytes of data.
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Uhg. Where do I go now? I really just ultimately want encrypted zfs replication...
Just price out S3 compatible storage and use backup software that can encrypt. Then it doesn't matter who holds it.
Wasabi is reputable and has fair pricing. iDrive is well priced.
I'm still sending to B2 until the price actually changes for me.
I personally use Duplicati (and yes I've tested restores).
rsync.net offers ZFS send/receive and I’ve been using it for 5 years now, it’s pretty great. It’s not super expensive per GB, but they ask a minimum of 5TB if you want native ZFS support, which is $60/month.
You get access to a full FreeBSD VM which is very nice, because you can do things like metrics or a “pull” setup that pulls backups from your machines, so you’re more resilient against stuff like ransomware.
Sounds good but $60 per month is a lot of money.
Yes it’s not the cheapest option, but I think it’s the only one if you need zfs send/receive. But if you don’t need it you can get less than 5TB for cheaper, or just go elsewhere.
This would increase my yearly cost from $99 to over 10k
You have over 70TB of data you want to backup? That’s a lot. How are you making backups of that for only 99/year?
I have a 190TB NAS, and Backblaze is $99 for unlimited. At least it was until now
Backblaze is definitely losing money on you every year, so good luck finding an alternative. I pay $100+/month just in power and network costs to have my own hardware colocated in a real data center, and that's saving me money compared to renting 200TB anywhere else.
Oh, I definitely know I'm not a profitable customer for them. My home electricity bill for my NAS is already a multiple of my Backblaze subscription
Storj is very similar in cost and features.
Backblaze is a service I really depend on, and one I've recommended. However they're still not profitable and investor money isnt going to keep them afloat forever.
I decided against Backblaze for server backups because they charge for certain API calls, and I ended up exceeding the quota when I was testing with the free tier. I was experimenting with encrypted backups and not sure how I exceeded it, but it really put me off that I could potentially have a surprise bill from experimenting without exceeding my storage quota. I went with iDrive e2 specifically because they don’t have API fees and it has worked fine the last couple years. My storage utilization has grown and I’ve been charged extra, which is expected, whereas API calls would be harder to predict depending on what I do in a given month. For self-hosting, I want easy, predictable pricing and don’t want to deal with surprise bills. It’s enough of a chore to manage cloud spend at work without it being a headache at home too.
The changes come as the company has experienced a 40X year-over-year increase in AI data stored on its servers and has increased focus on its accelerating AI business.
If this means they just want to throttle AI companies, I don’t care. Go forth and prosper BackBlaze.
If it doesn’t, statement retracted.
An individual storing 10tb on their "unlimited" cloud backup: $8/ month
A company storing 10tb on their S3: $60/month
An ai company storing 10tb on their faster S3: $150/month AND must use multiple petabytes (at least $30k/month)
It's easy to see which kind of customer they like to have
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It should be noted that this affects their BackBlaze backup client that operates alongside their unlimited personal storage solution. I doubt these issues exist with B2 storage where you can store whatever you want.
I’ve never used their personal backup plan because it’s for backing up a single machine. I have servers all over so I just use them for their S3 compatible object storage which is still a decent deal.
Best solution is still a second NAS at a friends home.
Ugh. How am I supposed to afford a friend in this economy?
Friend has a high maintenance cost though.
Thanks for the acronym definitions, it's like they wanted to report these news without really reporting it..
I got sick of paying for backblaze. Duplicati is a good free solution. You just need cloud storage to use it, which you might already be paying for in other services.
I use borgbase. It's not the same, but it's cheap and not stored in the US.
I just set up a launchd task on my Mac to run my Borg jobs and I never have to think about it. You could do the same with systemd on linux. If you're on Windows why are you still on Windows?
Backblaze is way cheaper than most 'standard' cloud storage though?
Basically moved 5TB away from Backblaze when they started raising their prices... greedy fucks, every one of them
Well that sucks. I use Backblaze and it has saved my ass more than once.
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