> currency conversion is expensive
Backblaze probably won't accept other currencies in 2018. However, we definitely have heard about this issue, and we have a feature in the works to allow you to "load up" your account with an arbitrary amount of pre-paid cash so that you pay ONE transaction fee to deposit (as an example) £250 pounds at once (incurring the £2.50 conversion fee exactly once) and then as Backblaze deducts from this account balance instead of a credit card there are zero transaction fees.
Would that help?
The OTHER reason this is a requested feature is some customers want a "reserve fund" to be used if their Credit Card payment fails, as a hedge against Backblaze deleting their data for lack of payment.
At last. I actually did abandon B2 over DO's Spaces due to the lack of this feature, despite the far more competitive pricing on your end. That, and the lack of AWS API support, but that was mostly related to my particular use case, which was the need to mount cloud storage as disk partitions using s3ql which mainly supports AWS, OpenStack and compatible services. It does have preliminary B2 support [0] but it was really hacky and I ended up losing data because of it.
Having a prepaid credit option and the option to use PayPal for such payments like DO does would have tipped me towards Backblaze's favor to the point of trying to fix s3ql's B2 support, though. ;)
If you don't have more than 1TiB, JuiceFS is totally free.
Disclaimer: Founder of JuiceFS here.
Which UK bank charges £2.15 in fees or exchange rate loading, on a £0.35 transaction?
(In my experience the most a UK bank will charge for a foreign currency card transaction is 2.75%.)
You will normally need to enter your PIN at checkouts. For non-Sterling (foreign currency) transactions we will charge a fee of 2.75% of the Sterling amount of the transaction. This fee will be shown as a separate line on your statement as a 'Non-Sterling Transaction Fee'.
http://www1.firstdirect.com/1/2/travel-and-international/tra...
And in my experience there's no minimum on this fee, i.e. the effective percentage isn't any higher for small amounts.
I agree with other people's comments about using Revolut and Transferwise cards for $ purchases in general. But if the commenter to whom I replied is spending $0.50 per month in USD, then the non-sterling transaction fee should be ~2 pence per month. So not worth the extra (albeit minor) hassle of maintaining another card.
Monzo also has 0 fees for international card payments.
"You will be charged a non-sterling transaction fee of 2.75% of the value plus a non-sterling purchase fee of £1.25 for each transaction"