I'm not so sure about Backblaze. I don't even think they're the biggest player in that space (AWS is, I would guess). I would guess most people could migrate off if Backblaze turned south.
I think the platform has a ton of potential and it already shows signs of real progress, but much like fly.io, its rough edges are incredibly rough.
Yet even though we're now dominant in our sector, we've got about 50% of the revenue from a couple of dozen very large customers, and the remaining from many hundred medium and small businesses, including many single-person shops.
A key ingredient is that we have a usage-based pricing element, so what we charge a customer monthly varies with their activity. And it's primarily this element that is tweaked between customers, so that it's affordable to both small and large, while still making it profitable for us to provide the software and support.
Having such a varied income stream has been quite good for us, and has allowed us to turn down potential lucrative customers which had unreasonable demands that could have killed us, or be flexible when certain customers really struggled under corona say, so they didn't have to go to a competitor.
I used to be quite negative to "call us" pricing, but got a new perspective after I started here. That said, I prefer transparent pricing when shopping software on my own.
Akamai doesn't look like the kind of company that wants to deal with 3,000,000 tiny accounts, and I don't think the customers will be happy with the service they get.
I guess to put it another way, do you use Cloudflare currently? If they made the free tier $5-$10/month for as many sites as you want, would you pay them or put in the effort to migrate?
I think I've got 2 sites I actually care about enough to want a CDN and DDoS protection. I would probably just pay up. I'm sure I could go somewhere else for free, but my Cloudflare setup works and I don't want to have to redo my Let's Encrypt wildcard.
