Backblaze, a company known for its backup solutions, is entering a new business area by offering cloud storage that competes with Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other cloud actors.

Launched in 2007 Backblaze stores 150 petabytes of backup data and over 10 billion files on its servers, having built its own storage pods and software as a policy.

Developers and enterprise IT customers could use B2 as a cheap mirror for data either in an existing cloud storage service or on-premises data center. Because the company now has a very stable backend system, many of its users asked about getting direct access to not just use it for backup but also to store data through an S3-like API.

Backblaze’s engineers spent a year working on the software to make this possible. Now, however, the team decided that it could launch a B2B product that can compete with the incumbents on both price and availability.

The storage service is priced at $0.05 per GB per month, which is half that of Amazon Glacier, AWS’s sluggish cold storage offering, and a fourth of the price of the regular speed Amazon S3 service. Budman acknowledges that the main reason to switch to Backblaze for a developer is price.

For startups like Everpix, which collapsed as it struggled to pay for huge storage costs, B2 could mean businesses that require large amounts of storage become viable. A free tier is also available, where up to 10GB can be stored at no cost, albeit with a download limit of 1GB or 2,500 downloads per day, whichever comes first.

At launch, B2 will offer a RESTful API, command-line interface and Web utility for uploading files and will only charge for what you use.

Backblaze is ready to take on the big boys in the cloud storage space by launching a service that significantly undercuts everyone else on price.

A private beta is open right now and it will be ready for public consumption before the end of 2015.