This was the reason we ended up moving away from B2. It may be durable but their storage isn't a drop-in replacement for S3 or similar products. They are really an S3-compatible target for backup softwares.

This would be fine for an automated system that could schedule requests or could fail, wait 30min, and try again. But it would be unusable by a human working interactively. You would constantly get complaints and monitor warnings that your "system is down".

I don't mind services that cut price dramatically in exchange for only supporting some (not all) use cases. That can be a very attractive offer, but does Backblaze explicitly position B2 for non-interactive use cases?

Yev from Backblaze here -> that maintenance window doesn't shut down the B2 Service each Thursday for two hours. We have lots of companies like Kanopy and Cloudspot that use us as an origin store without issue!