Backblaze B2

Backblaze B2 Neo wins NAB Show 2026 Product of the Year. Per Backblaze's announcement (April 27, 2026), the new B2 Neo tier targets media and post-production workloads — the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) award signals editorial validation in the M&E vertical, which has historically been the largest off-AWS object-storage market for video archives. For organizations evaluating self-hosted vs cloud archival of large media files, B2 Neo is now the highest-profile reference architecture choice in the space outside of hyperscaler proprietary tiers.

B2 Pay-as-You-Go pricing: $6/TB/month with free egress up to 3× average monthly storage. Backblaze's own May 2026 pricing statement lists $6/TB/month storage, free uploads, the first 10 GB stored free, and $0.01/GB for downloads beyond the 3× free-egress allowance — contradicting third-party reports of a rise to $6.95/TB, and corroborated by independent 2026 comparisons quoting $0.006/GB. Per Transparency in Cloud Storage Costs: Still Elusive (Backblaze blog, May 2026).

Q1 2026 earnings put numbers on the AI-workload thesis: B2 +24% YoY, AI customers +76%, guidance raised (primary SEC filing). Total revenue $38.7M (+12% YoY) with B2 Cloud Storage at $22.4M growing twice the corporate rate; AI customer count up 76% YoY and expanding ~3× faster than the average customer per the CEO; ≥$50K-ARR customers up 51% to 187 (now 17% of ARR); full-year guidance raised to $161.5–163.5M; the market read the AI mix shift as durable (a CoreWeave partnership deal in the same window). For the index's purposes this is the cleanest public evidence that AI training/inference data is repricing the independent object-storage tier, not just hyperscaler capacity. Per Backblaze Q1 2026 8-K exhibit (SEC EDGAR) (primary) and Blocks & Files — Backblaze beats guidance as AI drives growth.

B2 runs from three regions — US West (Sacramento), US East (Phoenix), and EU Central (Amsterdam) — with no Schrems II mitigation, since Backblaze remains a US parent company subject to the CLOUD Act. Worth flagging for EU-data workloads evaluating B2 as an S3-compatible alternative. Per DanubeData — Backblaze B2 Alternatives in Europe (2026).

B2 Neo is a white-label, high-performance S3-compatible tier for media and AI workloads, launched February 2026 ahead of its NAB Show 2026 award. Per Backblaze — B2 Neo Wins NAB Show 2026 Product of the Year.

Backblaze reported 24% YoY growth in Q1 2026 and closed its first eight-figure TCV neocloud agreement, tracking toward free-cash-flow positive in Q4 2026 — a signal of institutional traction for B2 in AI/neocloud storage deals. Per Blocks & Files — Backblaze beats guidance as AI drives growth.

September 2026 pricing check: B2 pay-as-you-go lists at $6.95/TB/month with API transaction fees ELIMINATED (May 2026 update) — superseding the $6 figure above. Backblaze's own pricing page now shows $6.95/TB/month, free egress up to 3× stored data volume, $0 API fees, and no minimum retention or minimum billable storage (vendor-published). The API-fee elimination is the load-bearing change for AI workloads writing millions of small JSON logs or checkpoint shards — it removes a cost axis Wasabi never charged but hyperscalers do. The retention contrast matters for the KV-cache-tier pattern this index tracks: Wasabi's 90-day minimum retention (and 1 TB billing floor) makes it a poor fit for ephemeral cache objects, while B2's zero-retention-minimum shape supports them cleanly. Per Backblaze — B2 cloud storage pricing. Sources: Backblaze B2 Neo wins NAB Show 2026 Product of the Year (Backblaze blog, April 27, 2026)