Backblaze Personal costs $9/mo — and unlike a tool you buy once, that bill never stops. Over three years that's roughly $324 for software doing a job your own hardware could just as easily do.
Where the subscription actually goes
$9/mo is the sticker price. It compounds: cancel and you typically lose access to your own history, and most plans ratchet the price up as you add usage, seats or storage — the bill rarely stays flat for long.
Syncvault: the pay-once alternative
Syncvault does the same core job for $29, once. Local backup agent that encrypts client-side and pushes to your own S3-compatible bucket or NAS.
| Syncvault | Backblaze Personal | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $29 once | $9/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $29 + ~$7 storage | $108 |
| Client-side encryption | Yes | Opt-in |
| Any S3 provider | Yes | No |
| Point-in-time version browsing | Yes | Yes |
| Works with local/NAS targets | Yes | No |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
A 100 GB backup is $29 once plus ~$7/yr of storage versus $108/yr on Backblaze — it pays for itself in about four months, then it's just bytes.
Is the subscription ever still worth it?
If you need Backblaze Personal's specific ecosystem, integrations or managed infrastructure and that's genuinely load-bearing for you, the subscription earns its keep — that's a real trade-off, not a trick. Syncvault is for everyone else: people paying every month for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
Try Syncvault — $29, once
Local backup agent that encrypts client-side and pushes to your own S3-compatible bucket or NAS.