Stepping back, a lot of people don't quite calculate their own storage costs correctly. But for a student with no income, they may not be able to afford that $60/month so that's kind of a judgement call. On the other hand if you are a professional photographer taking 1 GByte movies, and you want to upload and download that 1 GByte movie clip 200 times per day, that will cost you $2/day which still doesn't sound like that much money to me. So if you are talking about 5 MByte images you can download that image 200 times totally for free. On the other side of it (downloading) on each day, the first 1 GByte is free to download to Backblaze (each day). Uploading and downloading the same file over and over again will be expensiveįirst of all, 100% of all uploads to Backblaze are totally free, they cost nothing, so disregard that half. That's kind of slow if it is part of your workflow where you want to upload it one every hour. That doesn't seem 'slow' to me, but if your upstream network is capped to only 10 Mbits/sec and you are a professional photographer taking 100 MByte photos each 100 MByte image will take 2 minutes to upload. Most consumer cell phone images are maybe 5 MBytes, so we're talking about 1/20th of 1 second. If you have a 1 Gbit/sec network in your home (which is really getting quite common), you can download or upload a 100 MByte image in about 1 second. The qualifier 'slow' depends on the sizes of files you are downloading and uploading, the network connection you have, and what you mean by 'slow'. Uploading and downloading the same file over and over again will be. I feel like there are some assumptions built into that I just want to make really explicit, so breaking down a few of the phrases:

In general, cloud storage is meant for long-term storage and/or serving files to other computers on the Internet - uploading and downloading the same file over and over again will be expensive and slow.

Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze so I'm biased, you should keep me honest.

B2 storage pricing