Backblaze B2 pricing and free tier: storage, egress and API calls explained

Short answer: Backblaze B2 pay-as-you-go storage costs $6.95 per TB per month, the first 10 GB are always free, API calls are free and downloads are free up to three times the data you store. There are no minimum storage duration or minimum file size fees. All figures come from Backblaze’s official pricing pages, as of October 2026.

Backblaze B2 pricing at a glance

What changed in 2026

Backblaze announced on 17 March 2026 two changes that took effect on 1 May 2026:

• The pay-as-you-go storage price went from $6 to $6.95 per TB per month. Existing committed contracts keep their price until renewal; new commitments start at $6.95.
• API calls became free for every B2 customer. Before, downloads, listings and copies were billed per call above a daily allowance. Now only Event Notifications are charged.

The free 3x egress allowance, the free egress to partners and the pricing of B2 Overdrive and B2 Reserve did not change, and Backblaze stated it is not adding minimum storage duration fees. Many comparison sites still show $6 per TB, so check the date of anything you read.

Is Backblaze B2 free? The 10 GB free tier

Backblaze says the first 10 GB of storage are “always free”. It is not a trial with an end date: a bucket that stays under 10 GB costs nothing on storage, and because API calls are now free and egress is free up to 3x what you store, a small bucket can stay at $0 indefinitely.

What the free tier does not include:

• Storage above 10 GB, billed at the normal rate.
• Downloads beyond three times your average stored data. With 10 GB stored, that is about 30 GB of downloads a month before $0.01 per GB applies.
• Event Notifications beyond 2,500 calls a day.

If you want a hard stop, B2 lets you set daily data caps for storage and for Class A, B and C transactions, with alerts at 75% and 100% of each cap. Counters reset every day at 00:00 GMT.

How B2 bills storage

Storage is billed on the data stored per byte-hour over the month, at $6.95 per TB for a 30-day period. In practice that is a monthly average: keeping 2 TB for half the month and nothing for the other half costs about the same as 1 TB for the whole month. Deleted files stop costing as soon as they are gone, because there is no minimum storage duration.

How B2 egress works: the 3x rule

Downloads are free up to three times your average monthly storage, also measured in byte-hours over the billing cycle. Each GB above that costs $0.01.

Egress through Backblaze’s CDN and compute partners is free without the 3x limit. Its pricing page lists Fastly, Cloudflare, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Equinix Metal, Vultr and phoenixNAP.

Transactions: API calls are free

Backblaze groups API calls into four classes. Since 1 May 2026 three of them are free:

• Class A: uploads and deletes (PutObject, CreateMultipartUpload, UploadPart, DeleteObject, DeleteObjects). Free.
• Class B: downloads and metadata reads (GetObject, HeadObject). Free.
• Class C: bucket, listing and copy calls (CreateBucket, ListObjectsV2, CopyObject, HeadBucket). Free.
• Class D: Event Notifications. The first 2,500 calls a day are free, then $0.004 per 10,000.

This matters for tools that list buckets often or for many small files: on B2 neither adds to the bill.

What Backblaze B2 costs: worked examples

Storage only, with downloads inside the 3x allowance. Amounts are approximate because B2 bills by the byte-hour:

A heavy download month changes the picture. With 1 TB stored and 10 TB downloaded, B2 costs about $6.88 for storage plus about $70 for the 7 TB above the allowance. The same month on Cloudflare R2 costs $14.85 as long as reads stay inside its 10 million free monthly operations, because R2 charges more for storage but nothing for egress. B2 is the cheaper option while your downloads stay around 3x what you store, or when you serve files through a partner CDN; R2 wins when downloads are many times your stored data.

Other B2 plans

• Capacity commitment: annual terms from 1 to 5 years, billed in full at the start of the contract by invoice, with the rate locked and volume discounts on request.
• B2 Overdrive: from $15 per TB per month, with unlimited free egress, for high-throughput workloads. It requires a multi-petabyte commitment.

Backblaze B2 vs other providers

• Cloudflare R2: 10 GB-month free, $0.015 per GB-month, egress always free, operations billed above a monthly allowance.
• Wasabi: a flat price per TB aimed at larger volumes.
• Amazon S3: more storage classes and regions, with egress and requests billed separately.

For every provider side by side, see the S3 vs R2 vs Spaces vs Wasabi vs B2 comparison.

Using B2 with Nubbo

B2 has an S3-compatible API, so Nubbo connects to a bucket with a B2 application key and gives you a file browser, share links, galleries and file requests on top of it. Uploads and single-file downloads go straight between your browser and B2 through presigned URLs, so they never pass through Nubbo. Multi-file ZIP downloads are assembled in your browser, which downloads each file straight from your bucket, so those bytes count as B2 egress. Thumbnails are saved in your own bucket under .nubbo-thumbs/. With API calls now free on B2, browsing and syncing a bucket from Nubbo adds nothing to your bill beyond storage and egress.