Backblaze B2 Pricing Calculator
An intuitive tool to help you estimate your monthly costs for Backblaze B2 cloud object storage. This backblaze pricing calculator considers data storage, bandwidth, and API transaction fees to provide a clear cost projection.
Estimate Your B2 Costs
Cost Breakdown Chart
Dynamic bar chart showing the breakdown of your estimated monthly costs.
What is the Backblaze B2 Pricing Model?
The Backblaze B2 pricing model is renowned for its simplicity and affordability, positioning it as a strong competitor to services like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob Storage. Unlike competitors that often have complex pricing tiers, regional variations, and multiple storage classes, Backblaze B2 offers a straightforward, pay-as-you-go model. The core principle is that you only pay for what you use, with generous free tiers to get started. This makes the backblaze pricing calculator an essential tool for developers, IT professionals, and businesses looking to forecast their cloud storage expenditures accurately. Common misconceptions include thinking that egress (download) fees are prohibitively expensive, when in reality, they are among the cheapest in the industry, or that the service is only for backups, when it is a fully-featured object storage solution suitable for a wide range of applications.
Backblaze B2 Pricing Formula and Mathematical Explanation
Calculating your potential monthly cost with Backblaze B2 involves summing up three main components: storage, data download (egress), and transactions. Our backblaze pricing calculator automates this, but understanding the formula is key to effective cost management.
- Storage Cost: Backblaze provides the first 10 GB of storage for free. Beyond that, the cost is a flat rate per gigabyte per month.
- Download (Egress) Cost: You get 1 GB of free data downloads per day. For the purpose of this monthly calculator, we simplify this to the first GB of the month being free. Any data downloaded beyond this allowance incurs a per-gigabyte fee.
- Transaction Cost: API calls are categorized (Class A, B, C). Class A calls are free. Class B (e.g., uploads) and Class C (e.g., downloads, listings) operations have a free daily allowance (2,500 each), after which a small fee is charged per thousand requests.
The total cost is the sum of these three parts after applying the free tier allowances. Our backblaze pricing calculator uses these precise variables for its estimations.
| Variable | Meaning | Unit | Typical Range |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage (S) | Total data stored on B2 servers | Gigabytes (GB) | 0 – 1,000,000+ |
| Download (D) | Data transferred out from B2 | Gigabytes (GB) | 0 – 100,000+ |
| Class B Ops (T_b) | Write/Upload API operations | Thousands of Requests | 0 – 50,000+ |
| Class C Ops (T_c) | Read/Download API operations | Thousands of Requests | 0 – 500,000+ |
Breakdown of the core variables used for calculating Backblaze B2 costs.
Practical Examples (Real-World Use Cases)
Example 1: Small Business Website Backup
A small marketing agency backs up its website assets and client files, totaling 350 GB. They download about 20 GB per month for restorations or access. Their backup software performs 5,000 (5k) Class B transactions and 15,000 (15k) Class C transactions.
- Inputs: Storage=350 GB, Download=20 GB, Class B=5k, Class C=15k
- Outputs (Estimated):
- Storage Cost: (350 – 10) * $0.005 = $1.70
- Download Cost: (20 – 1) * $0.01 = $0.19
- Transaction Cost: $0 (well within free tier)
- Total Monthly Cost: ~$1.89
- Interpretation: The cost is incredibly low, demonstrating B2’s value for backup and archival purposes. The agency can reliably protect its data for less than the price of a coffee. Using a backblaze pricing calculator helps them confirm this low TCO.
Example 2: Media Content Delivery
A video blogger hosts 2 TB (2048 GB) of video files for their new streaming platform. They anticipate high traffic, with 500 GB of downloads per month. Their application will make approximately 100,000 (100k) Class B calls for uploads and 1,000,000 (1,000k) Class C calls for serving file information.
- Inputs: Storage=2048 GB, Download=500 GB, Class B=100k, Class C=1,000k
- Outputs (Estimated):
- Storage Cost: (2048 – 10) * $0.005 = $10.19
- Download Cost: (500 – 1) * $0.01 = $4.99
- Transaction Cost: (Class B: (100k-75k)/10k*$0.004) + (Class C: (1000k-75k)/1k*$0.004) = $0.01 + $3.70 = $3.71
- Total Monthly Cost: ~$18.89
- Interpretation: Even with significant data storage and heavy download traffic, the monthly cost remains under $20. This showcases why B2 is an attractive option for developers building data-intensive applications. Running this scenario through a backblaze pricing calculator is a crucial step before launch.
How to Use This backblaze pricing calculator
Our calculator is designed for simplicity and speed. Follow these steps to get your estimate:
- Enter Data Stored: Input the total gigabytes (GB) you expect to store in the “Data Stored” field.
- Enter Data Downloaded: Input the total gigabytes (GB) you will download (egress) from B2 in the “Data Downloaded” field.
- Enter Transactions: Estimate your Class B (writes) and Class C (reads) API calls in thousands. For many use cases, the default values are a good starting point if you’re unsure.
- Review the Results: The calculator instantly updates your total estimated monthly cost. The intermediate values show you exactly where the costs are coming from—storage, downloads, or transactions. The dynamic bar chart provides a quick visual breakdown.
- Make Decisions: Use this estimate to budget for your storage needs, compare B2 against other providers like AWS or Google Cloud, and understand the financial impact of your application’s architecture. This backblaze pricing calculator is your first step towards cost-effective cloud storage.
Key Factors That Affect Backblaze B2 Pricing Results
Several factors can influence your final bill. Understanding them allows for better cost optimization.
- Data Volume: The most direct factor. The more data you store past the 10 GB free tier, the higher your storage cost.
- Egress Traffic: Heavy data downloads are the second major cost driver. If you serve large files to many users, monitor this closely. Consider using a free egress partner like Cloudflare to reduce this cost to zero.
- API Call Frequency: While the free tier for transactions is generous (75,000 of each class B/C per month), applications with extremely high request rates (e.g., millions of listings per day) can see these costs add up.
- Data Redundancy Strategy: While B2 is inherently durable, some users choose to replicate data across multiple regions or even providers, which would multiply storage costs. This backblaze pricing calculator estimates costs for a single B2 account.
- File Sizes: An application that uploads millions of tiny files will generate more Class B transactions than one that uploads a few very large files for the same total storage volume.
- Use of Bandwidth Alliance: Backblaze has partnered with several CDN and compute providers (like Cloudflare and Vultr) to offer free egress. Routing your downloads through these partners can eliminate your data download costs entirely. Our cloud storage cost comparison tool can help illustrate these savings.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
No, Backblaze prides itself on transparent pricing. There are no deletion fees, no minimum storage duration fees, and no complex tiers. The costs are based purely on storage, downloads, and transactions as detailed in our backblaze pricing calculator.
Yes, the 10 GB of storage and the daily free allowances for downloads and transactions are part of the standard B2 service and do not expire.
Backblaze B2 is significantly cheaper than standard Amazon S3, especially for storage and data egress. S3’s pricing is much more complex, with different storage classes and higher download costs. Our backblaze pricing calculator shows just how substantial these savings can be. For more, see our data archiving best practices guide.
If you use a Bandwidth Alliance partner like Cloudflare to serve your files, the data egress from Backblaze B2 to Cloudflare is completely free. This would make your “Download Cost” $0, a major cost-saving strategy.
No, this backblaze pricing calculator is focused on the pay-as-you-go model. B2 Reserve is a capacity-based model where you pre-purchase storage (starting at 20 TB) for a fixed term, which can offer even greater savings for large-scale users.
A transaction is an API call made to the B2 service. Uploading a file (`b2_upload_file`) is a Class B transaction, while downloading a file (`b2_download_file_by_name`) is a Class C transaction. You can find a full list in the Backblaze B2 API documentation.
This calculator provides a very close estimate based on Backblaze’s public pricing. The actual cost is calculated hourly by Backblaze, so minor variations may occur, but for monthly budgeting, this tool is highly reliable.
Yes, Backblaze allows you to set daily caps on storage, downloads, and transactions to control your spending and prevent unexpected charges.