"... more than 4 trillion photos are stored in Google Photos, and every week 28 billion new photos and videos are uploaded"
So for 1 Megabyte photos, they have on the order of 4,000 petabytes in storage now, and are adding 28 petabytes per week. So at Backblaze B2 prices, that would be $20m / month in storage and a mere $140k / month growth. (And Google's internal cost of storage is definitely less than Backblaze B2... the discounts they offer to public Google Cloud customers per petabyte are pretty big).
In comparison, Facebook is getting hit with more than 10PB of photos per month. YouTube surely dwarfs all of that. (Google Photos may be harder to monetize, but traffic is also way way lower).
Surely Google is being exceptionally stingy with this move to charging for Google Photos. Google Cloud itself has many many contracts that are north of $20m per month. This move is likely less of "the gains to ad targeting from private photos fell short even during the pandemic ad surge" and more of "the YouTube price hike went swimmingly, how can we gouge more for services now that the pandemic has shown people will pay?" Also probably with a sprinkle of "we're starting to have high employee turnover, how can we make sure the product doesn't become a zombie risk in 5 years?"
Not really a fair comparison. Backblaze doesn't thumbnail, index, transcode, compress, collage and animate, or run AI models on your data (e.g., for face/object detection, gene.) Running all that for 28 billion photos a month costs a lot of money. (And that excludes all the engineering cost of building front ends, android apps, integrations, etc.)
All the software infra and processing was built years ago for Google Plus, so the ongoing engineering costs are minimal. The compute might be more than Backblaze, but it's predictable (the majority happens on upload) and it's a tiny tiny fraction of the cost of daily search indexing, YouTube, etc.
The costly thing for Google is storage and bandwidth to the storage (since it's hard to predict what can be kept cold-- but recognizing faces and objects can help). And those costs, as we see, are a drop in the bucket for Google. That's why I conjecture this move is much more about marketing and company culture and less about real technical constraints.
Another datapoint: Flickr Pro is as low as $5/month for unlimited full-res photos. So Google Photos (beyond 15GB) at ~$1.6/month would get to undercut Flickr yet won't even offer unlimited space.
So for 1 Megabyte photos, they have on the order of 4,000 petabytes in storage now, and are adding 28 petabytes per week. So at Backblaze B2 prices, that would be $20m / month in storage and a mere $140k / month growth. (And Google's internal cost of storage is definitely less than Backblaze B2... the discounts they offer to public Google Cloud customers per petabyte are pretty big).
In comparison, Facebook is getting hit with more than 10PB of photos per month. YouTube surely dwarfs all of that. (Google Photos may be harder to monetize, but traffic is also way way lower).
Surely Google is being exceptionally stingy with this move to charging for Google Photos. Google Cloud itself has many many contracts that are north of $20m per month. This move is likely less of "the gains to ad targeting from private photos fell short even during the pandemic ad surge" and more of "the YouTube price hike went swimmingly, how can we gouge more for services now that the pandemic has shown people will pay?" Also probably with a sprinkle of "we're starting to have high employee turnover, how can we make sure the product doesn't become a zombie risk in 5 years?"