Today’s myth might sound familiar:
Storage is a minor cost, so it’s not worth switching from major cloud providers.
It’s easy to see how this thinking takes hold. In many cloud-native projects, storage can be the last concern. Compute, networking, and database services often drive most of the costs. Storage? That’s just where your data sits.
But hidden fees, unpredictable retrieval charges, and surprising performance constraints make storage far more impactful than many teams realize—especially for cloud-native workflows.
This post is the second in our blog series unpacking four of the most common myths and misconceptions about specialized cloud storage—see the first post here—and why an interoperable, best-of-breed approach can enhance and streamline cloud-native app development.
New Cloud Native Times Call for New Cloud Storage Approaches
Learn more about how the open cloud supports faster development, improved workflows, and reduced cost complexity in our free ebook, “New Cloud Native Times Call for New Cloud Storage Approaches.”
Underestimate the importance of storage at your peril
Major cloud providers offer plenty of storage options, but the real costs aren’t always clear up front.
The charges you don’t see coming
Between egress charges, API call fees, transaction costs, and minimum retention charges, even small changes in how your application moves or retrieves data can quickly inflate your bill.
What looked affordable at launch can snowball into sticker shock once traffic increases or new workloads start driving more data in and out of storage. A single spike in user activity or analytics queries can trigger thousands (or millions) of storage transactions, each billed individually.
These expenses add up fast, and they’re tough to predict.
The egress trap
Egress charges might be one of the best-kept open secrets among the “big three” cloud providers. Every time data leaves their environment—whether to a CDN, another cloud, or end users—egress fees kick in. And they aren’t trivial.
Frequent data transfers, a hallmark of cloud-native architectures, can quietly devour budgets. The big dogs know this. Once your data is deep in their ecosystem, pulling it out becomes financially painful.
This creates a subtle but powerful form of vendor lock-in, making it harder to shift workloads or storage to more specialized providers.
Vendor lock-in, by design
Major cloud providers bundle storage, compute, networking, and a long list of services into tightly coupled ecosystems. On paper, that integration offers convenience. In practice, it creates real friction if you ever want to move.
Even when using open standards like the S3 API, migrating workloads can require new tooling, careful planning, and extensive testing. Under tight deadlines, the mere prospect of switching providers can feel too risky to attempt.
It’s not just inertia; it’s engineered friction designed to keep you tethered.
Complex storage slows down everything
Bundling storage inside a big cloud provider’s stack might seem efficient, but it often creates fragile setups that slow teams down. Configurations get complicated fast:
- Hot and cold storage tiers
- Lifecycle rules
- IAM policies
- Interdependent compute pipelines
Every added layer increases the odds that something breaks, pulling engineers into troubleshooting instead of building.
Latency-sensitive workloads such as real-time analytics or streaming services are especially vulnerable. Even small missteps can ripple through the user experience.
And when those issues hit, teams scramble to patch things up, burning time and resources that could be better spent moving products forward.
AI workloads bring storage costs into sharp focus
AI-powered applications, from model training to updating retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, put heavy demands on storage. These workloads hammer systems with high-throughput reads and writes.
Each refresh or update adds to your bill:
- Delete penalties
- Retention minimums
- API call surcharges
When teams start rationing runs, batching updates, or delaying refreshes just to control costs, innovation slows.
Specialized storage keeps costs predictable and workloads agile
Unlike the “big three” cloud providers, who often hide complexity behind convenience, specialized cloud storage providers like Backblaze B2 take a more transparent approach:
- Clear, predictable pricing means no surprise egress fees, retrieval costs, API charges, or deletion penalties.
- Always-hot storage eliminates the need for lifecycle policies and tier management.
- Open architecture means you stay in control—no proprietary hooks, no walled gardens, and no painful unwinding if your needs change down the road.
For cloud-native teams, this isn’t just a storage swap; it’s an operational upgrade. Streamlined management, lower risk, and transparent costs mean teams can focus on shipping new products and features, not decoding their storage bills.
In fact, Enterprise Strategy Group released a comprehensive analysis of the economic benefits of Backblaze B2 in May 2025. The analysis concluded that Backblaze B2’s storage costs (monthly storage cost + cost of downloads + cost of transactions) were 3.1x to 3.2x lower than alternative cloud storage providers.
Simple, transparent, affordable pricing enabled Backblaze B2 users to spend far less on storage and use the savings to innovate and grow.
—Enterprise Strategy Group
What’s next for you and storage?
If you liked this article, check out the first in the series, “Cloud Storage Myths Debunked: Hyperscaler Storage Is Good Enough for Cloud-Native Apps.” And, stay tuned for the next post in this series, where we’ll tackle myth #3, addressing whether onboarding specialized providers is too hard. (It’s easier than you think.)
Want to dig even deeper? Download the full ebook “New Cloud-Native Times Call for New Cloud Storage Approaches.”
