(credit: Photograph by Beer Coaster)

Cloud backup provider Backblaze has launched a new business-oriented backup service called Business Groups that gives its low-cost cloud backup service enterprise manageability and administration. Backblaze does betray its non-enterprise origins, however, by offering clear pricing without hiding behind “ask us for a quote” forms; $5 per month per PC, or $50 per year.

Backblaze’s cloud backup service is something of a novelty. That $50 per year gets you unlimited cloud storage, and while other cloud backup providers have offered unlimited storage, many of them have scaled back those offerings because they don’t make anything from them. Backblaze, by contrast, maintains that it actually makes money from its service, on account of the dirt-cheap storage it designs and uses, which costs just a fraction of what services like Amazon S3 and Azure Storage do.

The company added a programmatic cloud storage service, named B2, to its backup plan in 2015. B2 offers developers substantially lower costs, albeit without geographical replication or other features of the more-expensive cloud providers. The company positions this as ideal for cheap backups or replicas of data that is primarily stored in another cloud provider.