If this pricing model described in these tweets is actually accurate once R2 is released and once AWS responds (assuming that R2 doesn’t suck for other reasons) then this is business-plan-changing good pricing.

Imagine a competitor to YouTube. Storing tons of video content is expensive. Serving it to users is also expensive. Especially with those egress pricings. 1M * 1gb of egress costing 54k is completely undoable profitably unless that data is very valuable. Meanwhile <$1 is “put this MVP startup product on my credit card while applying to YCombinator” affordable.

If R2 could point to Backblaze instead of S3 as a compatibility layer (S3 compatible so should be easy), the you could have CHEAP redundancy and low costs without any egress fees.

I can think of several niche video sharing use cases not wel serviced by YouTube that just aren’t profitable enough to host so haven’t seen any startups succeed and I can totally see it now happening. Maybe I’ll try to make it happen…