"(it also looks like you might have to preallocate vs pay on demand)"

Technically you do have to pre-allocate, but it works like pay-on-demand because:

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We can increase the size of your filesystem at any time, with no downtime involved - so there is no need to overbuy in anticipation of future usage.

Further, you are granted a +10% grace at all times, so you always have some room to grow.

Finally, the system automatically emails you as you get close to your limit, so there is never an unexpected filling of space.

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You still have to manage how much storage you have allocated, instead of just using it and paying based on how much storage you actually use.

One big difference is that with B2 you can't have append-only backups. (or maybe it's very non-obvious from the docs?) That's pretty much why I use rsync.net instead - I can configure a separate key for uploads. Otherwise what's to stop anyone lifting the B2 access key from the host with automatic backups configured and just deleting all old data?

I don't have huge backup needs (around 500GB, doesn't grow much over time), so I just use duplicity and upload to AWS S3 with the "infrequent access" setting, and have the bucket auto-replicate to another region in another country. Costs me around $12/mo just for the data storage. The AWS calculator tells me if I had to retrieve all that data it would cost under $10 to do so.

Given it's all personal data that I can stand to be without for days if needed, I could probably use Glacier (or even Glacier Deep Archive) and pay less than a third of the cost (or less than a twelfth!), but the absolute dollar amount isn't high enough for me to go through the trouble of changing up my backup scripts.

Sure, if you're running a business and are constantly generating lots of new data that needs to be backed up, that gets more expensive, but I also would expect a business with that much data could easily afford to spend several orders of magnitude more than I do on backups.

I use Linode Object Storage (a S3-like service) with rclone to manage my backups. (my backups are only a few dozens of gb, I don't need something like duplicity at the moment)

So far I'm happy with it, pricing is $5/month per 250gb + 1To egress. And, most importantly, none of the AWS complexity overhead. I have enough of that at work.

the rsync guy posted in another recent thread that it’s actually 3x above a certain size, which i took to be most serious usage.