01. The pitch

Rule: the pitch is a hypothesis about their pain, not a product tour. Say it, then ask a question.

The 30-second pitch (default)

“Backblaze is S3-compatible object storage that stays hot and stays cheap. One storage class at $6.95 a terabyte a month, no tiers, no retrieval fees, no minimum retention, and egress is free up to three times what you store. If you use Cloudflare, Fastly, CoreWeave, or Vultr, egress through them is free, period. Teams use it for immutable backup copies, media archives they actually touch, and AI datasets that need to move between GPU clouds. Most customers point their existing tools at a new endpoint and they are done. Where is storage cost or egress hurting you today?”

Why it works:

• Three numbers a CFO can repeat: $6.95, 3x, $0.
• “Point your existing tools at a new endpoint” kills migration fear early.
• Ends on their pain.

30-second variants by persona

CIO / VP Infrastructure “Your cloud storage bill has two lines that grow faster than the data: retrieval and egress. Backblaze removes both for most workloads. One always-hot tier at about a third of S3 Standard list, free egress up to 3x stored, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA BAA available, and Object Lock for ransomware-proof copies. It is a public company, 100,000+ B2 customers, and CoreWeave just signed a $335 million multi-exabyte deal for it. What would you do with 60 to 70 percent of your object storage budget back?”

Storage / backup admin “If you run Veeam, Rubrik, Commvault, or a Synology, you can add an immutable off-site copy in about twenty minutes. B2 is an S3-compatible target with Object Lock, so your backup software sets the retention and nobody, including a compromised admin, can delete those restore points in compliance mode. Restores are not throttled or billed like Glacier. How do you test restores today, and what does a full restore cost you?”

ML platform lead “Your GPUs cost more per hour than your storage costs per month. Backblaze keeps the dataset in one S3 bucket and lets you pull it into any GPU cloud without paying egress tax: free to CoreWeave and Vultr through partnerships, and with B2 Overdrive you get dedicated throughput from 100 Gbps up to 1 Tbps with unlimited free egress anywhere. Decart went from 0 to 16 PB in 90 days on it. Where does your training data live today, and where do your GPUs live?”

MSP owner “You sell backup with margin. Backblaze gives you a storage cost you can quote a year out: $6.95 a terabyte, no egress surprises when a client needs a full restore, Object Lock for the cyber insurance checklist, and a Partner API to provision and bill sub-accounts under your brand. Which of your backup stacks still lands on AWS or a NAS in a closet?”

Neocloud / GPU-as-a-Service operator “Your customers want object storage next to your GPUs. Building it on Ceph means hiring a storage team and owning hard drive operations for years. B2 Neo is white-label object storage you provision through the Partner API, with custom domains, SSO, and no egress fees. CoreWeave uses Backblaze for HDD tiers in its AI Object Storage. How many of your customers keep data in a hyperscaler and pay egress to reach you?”

The 2-minute pitch (whiteboard-ready)

Draw three boxes as you talk: Data sources on the left, B2 in the middle, Consumers on the right.

1. The problem (20s). “Object storage pricing got complicated on purpose. Hyperscalers sell cheap cold tiers, then charge you to read, to retrieve, to delete early, and to move data out. The more useful your data is, the more you pay. That is backwards for backup restores, media reuse, and AI training, where the whole point is to read the data.”
2. What Backblaze is (25s). “Backblaze B2 is S3-compatible object storage built on Backblaze’s own hardware and software, run in data centers in Sacramento, Stockton, Phoenix, Reston, Amsterdam, and Toronto. One class: always hot. 11 nines designed durability using 17 data plus 3 parity shards across 20 storage pods. Over an exabyte under management.”
3. The economics (25s). “List is $6.95 per TB per month, billed per byte-hour. No minimum object size, no minimum storage duration. Free egress up to 3x your average stored data, then a penny a gig. Free egress, unlimited, through Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Equinix Metal, Vultr, and phoenixNAP. API calls are free except Class D event notifications. Term deals of 1 to 5 years lock the rate.”
4. What it plugs into (20s). Draw arrows from left box. “Backup software, NAS, MAM systems, data pipelines. Hundreds of integrations. If it speaks S3, change the endpoint and keys.”
5. Protection (15s). “Object Lock in governance or compliance mode, legal hold, SSE-B2 encryption on by default for new uploads since September 2026, SSE-C if you hold the keys, scoped app keys, Cloud Replication across regions.”
6. The AI layer (15s). Draw arrows right to GPU clusters. “For AI and HPC, B2 Overdrive gives dedicated vaults and 100 Gbps to 1 Tbps throughput with unlimited free egress starting at $15/TB with a multi-PB commit. For GPU clouds, B2 Neo is white-label.”
7. Close (10s). “Let’s pick one workload and price it on your numbers, then prove it with a POC. Which workload costs you the most to read today?”

Pitch landmines (do not say these)

• “Backblaze is cheaper than Glacier.” It is not, per GB stored. Win on retrieval, latency, and simplicity instead.
• “Unlimited free egress” without the qualifier. B2 is 3x free, then $0.01/GB. Unlimited is partner egress and Overdrive.
• “Multi-region by default.” A B2 account lives in one region. Multi-region needs Cloud Replication to a second account.
• “Same as S3.” It is S3-compatible with documented gaps: no object-level ACLs, no IAM roles, no object tagging, no website configuration, no browser POST uploads to presigned URLs (docs checked 2026-10-14).
• “HIPAA certified.” There is no such certification. Say “BAA available for covered entities”.
• “FedRAMP.” Backblaze lists GovRAMP Progressing Snapshot and TX-RAMP Provisional. Not FedRAMP.