$2100 per month for an entire rack worth of Pods (space, power, connectivity) $74,000 is the cost to build 10 Pods to fill that rack. If the Pods are assumed to have a lifetime of 3 years (most will last longer, but lets depreciate at this rate), and if the cost of capital is 20%/year, this equates to a monthly "payment/amortization" cost of $2750. Thus leading to a total cost per rack of $4850 ~ lets say $5000.
1350TB of raw storage is provided by this rack, which can be scaled to 13/15 to account for RAID6 (as revealed by brianwski here) - thus leaving 1170TB available for use. FS overhead etc, lets take this to provide 1PB of storage.
So, essentially, storage costs backblaze about 0.5 cents ($0.005) /GB-month. There are other costs ofcourse, Sean (amongst others) needs to get paid, etc. To go by a common thumb rule, for a minimum sale price, one third of sale price should be profit, another third should be org expenses/marketing/everything else and the remaining third should be the actual cash cost of the building/providing the product/service.
So very roughly, Backblaze could provide storage at about 1.5 cents /GB-month. Factor in 3-way software-level redundancy of data, and you are now upto 5 cents/GB-months for a very high quality storage service.
Contrasting this with 15c/GB-month that Amazon charges (in addition to transfer charges), I do have to wonder why Backblaze wants to stick to the "unlimited desktop backups" business. Even Google storage charges 17c/GB-month, in addition to per-request charges.
Its quite possible I have some factors wrong here and If anyone can spot anything wrong, I'd like to know. Nevertheless, it seems from the numbers provided that backblaze could make a killing in this market. I know I would be interested in using a pure storage backend - equivalent to S3. I use tarsnap and if tarsnap could reduce its backend costs by two-thirds, I know I'd be very happy.
What am I missing?
edit: wrote PB instead of TB. Numbers remain correct, though