Best Backblaze B2 Alternative for File Sharing

EasySend vs Backblaze B2: Honest Side-by-Side

The B2 to EasySend Workflow Most Teams Land On

The cleanest pattern is to keep B2 for what it is good at (cheap cold storage at $0.006/GB/month) and use EasySend as the warm sharing layer in front of it. The workflow looks like this in plain text:

[ Your machine ]
       |
       | (rclone or B2 CLI: nightly backup)
       v
[ Backblaze B2 bucket ]    <-- cold storage, $0.006/GB/month
       |
       | (you select a file to share, download from B2)
       v
[ Local temp file ]
       |
       | (curl POST to EasySend free public API)
       v
[ EasySend warm sharing layer ]
       |
       | (clean URL with preview, no egress fees)
       v
[ Recipient browser, no account, no app ]

The economic argument is in the egress numbers. B2 charges $0.01/GB egress after a 1 GB/day free allowance (verified 2026-06-03 from the Backblaze B2 pricing page). That sounds cheap until a file gets shared widely. A 500 MB PDF that 1,000 people download is 500 GB of egress, or $5.00 in egress charges plus the storage cost. If the file is reshared and downloads 10,000 times, that is $50.00 in egress just to deliver a PDF you already paid to store.

EasySend has no egress fees. A 500 MB file downloaded 10,000 times costs nothing extra. Cloudflare R2 (which EasySend sits on) does not charge egress, and we pass that through. The warm-sharing-in-front-of-B2 pattern lets you keep the cold archive cheap and skip the egress meter for the public-facing copy.

Egress Math: When the Switch Pays for Itself

Let us be concrete. If your team shares files that average 100 MB and you have 50 downloads per month, that is 5 GB of egress. After the 1 GB/day free tier (which is per day, not per month, so it does not accumulate), realistic egress is about 4 GB, costing $0.04. Negligible. Stay on raw B2 with signed URLs.

If your team shares files that average 500 MB with 500 downloads per month, that is 250 GB of egress. After free allowance, roughly 240 GB billable at $0.01/GB equals $2.40/month. Still small.

If you are running a SaaS that delivers builds, documentation, public datasets or any file that goes viral occasionally, the math changes. 2 TB of egress per month is $20. 10 TB is $100. The first time a single share goes viral and chews 5 TB of egress in 48 hours, you owe $50 to Backblaze for that one weekend. EasySend Premium is $1.99/month flat with no egress meter. The break-even is roughly 200 GB of egress per month: above that, EasySend is cheaper than B2 for the sharing path alone.

What B2 Does Better

• Cold storage at scale. $0.006/GB/month is genuinely cheap. EasySend is not a storage product. If you want to hold a 5 TB archive, B2 is the right tool.
• Versioning, retention policies, object locks. B2 supports S3-compatible versioning and object lock for compliance. EasySend has neither.
• Programmatic operations. B2 has a full S3-compatible API for lifecycle, replication, bucket policies. EasySend's free API is upload-and-share, not full object management.
• Backup integrations. rclone, Restic, Borg, Veeam, Synology Hyper Backup and most NAS units have B2 as a first-class target. EasySend does not integrate with backup tools.
• Multi-region replication. B2 supports cross-region replication. EasySend uses Cloudflare R2 with its own redundancy model but no user-configurable replication.

What EasySend Does Better

• Recipient experience. B2 hands you a signed URL that downloads raw bytes with no UI. EasySend gives you a hosted download page with preview, file metadata, optional password and a scannable QR code.
• No egress fees. Share popular files without watching the bill climb.
• No setup. Skip bucket creation, application key generation, CORS policy and signed URL signing.
• Optional client-side encryption included. B2 server-side encryption holds the keys. EasySend's optional AES-256-GCM is client-side, free and zero-knowledge.
• Free public API with no auth. Hit the EasySend API from a shell script with curl, no credentials. B2 requires an account ID and application key for every call.

Threat Model: Where Each Wins

B2 wins on storage durability claims (11 nines), versioning for ransomware recovery, object lock for compliance retention and the S3 ecosystem of tools. If your security posture requires a SOC 2 vendor, B2 has one. EasySend does not.

EasySend wins on encryption posture for shared files. B2's default encryption is server-side: Backblaze holds the keys. A subpoena to Backblaze plus their cooperation reveals plaintext. EasySend's optional client-side encryption removes the key from any server. If your threat model includes the storage vendor, the EasySend client-side path is stronger.

Neither tool solves: compromised endpoints, malicious recipients, social engineering. Both are honest about that.

Migration: B2 to EasySend for the Sharing Path

You do not need to migrate everything. The recommended pattern is to keep B2 as your archive and use EasySend only for files you share publicly. For each file you want to share:

1. Download the file from your B2 bucket (b2-cli, rclone or the web UI).
2. POST it to the EasySend free public API (one curl command).
3. Get back a clean URL with a preview page.
4. Share that URL instead of the B2 signed URL.

For automation, the EasySend API accepts files via multipart form upload with no authentication. See the developer API docs for code samples in curl, Python and JavaScript. You can drop this into a CI step or a backup post-script.

Pricing in Real Numbers

Backblaze B2 storage is $0.006/GB/month with 10 GB free. Egress is $0.01/GB after 1 GB/day free or free up to 3x your stored data via the friendly egress policy (verified 2026-06-03). Class B transactions (downloads) are $0.004 per 10,000 calls. Class C transactions (list, delete, copy) are $0.004 per 1,000.

EasySend Free is 1 GB per file, 3-day expiry, unlimited downloads, no egress fees. Premium is $1.99/month for 10 GB per file, 30-day expiry, custom URLs and the same no-egress policy. For team workflows that share files publicly, EasySend at $1.99/month flat is often cheaper than B2 once egress climbs above 200 GB/month. See EasySend pricing.

Related Pages

If you also evaluated other S3-compatible storage, see our Wasabi alternative for a similar warm-sharing-in-front-of-storage pattern. For developer integration, the EasySend developer API is the relevant doc. For team sharing without enterprise overhead, see ShareFile alternative or Box alternative.

Frequently Asked Questions