The Best Usenet Block Accounts

First place in detail: XS News Block 5000

XS News' largest block costs €59.95 for 5,000 GB — that is €1.20 per 100 GB. Add 200 simultaneous connections, eleven years of retention and the highest rating on the market: 4.8 from more than 1,200 Trustpilot reviews.

It is expressly not the cheapest per GB: third place sits at €0.95 per 100 GB, roughly a fifth less. That provider has no Trustpilot profile and barely five years of retention though — which is exactly what the other three criteria are for. If price per GB is all you care about, sort by that column and buy there.

What matters more here than the provider is the size. The same provider also sells 100 GB for €9.95 — €9.95 per 100 GB, or more than eight times as much per gigabyte. This ranking shows each provider's best price per GB, and that is almost always its largest block. If you do not need five terabytes, first place is not automatically your deal: work out the price per 100 GB for the size you actually intend to buy.

What a block account is

A block account is a one-off purchase of Usenet data — no subscription, no term, nothing to cancel. You pay once for, say, 1,000 GB and draw that credit down whenever you like. At most providers it does not expire. A block is the counterpart to a monthly subscription: there you pay for time, here you pay for volume.

Two situations make it the clearly better choice. First, occasional use: if you download only a few files a month, a subscription bills you for stretches in which you are not using the access at all. Second, as a second provider on a different backbone. When articles are missing at your main provider, you fetch them through the block at the second one — paying only for the parts that were actually missing rather than for a second full subscription.

How this ranking is built

Four criteria are scored. The heaviest is price per GB, because volume is exactly what a block account is bought for. Retention and the Trustpilot rating follow with equal weight, and the number of simultaneous connections comes last. The other three are there to stop a cheap block with short retention, few connections or unhappy customers from winning on price alone.

Each provider appears exactly once, represented by its best block per GB. The reason: at almost every provider the price per GB improves as the block gets bigger. Ranking individual plans would let one provider's size ladder fill half the list, which would make it worthless as a comparison.

Why the cheapest price per GB does not simply win

The cheapest block per GB is not necessarily first in this list, and that is deliberate. A block with 3,000 days of retention and 30 connections is not the same product as one with over 5,000 days and 100 connections, even when both cost about the same per gigabyte. The weighting is what brings those differences back in.

Price per GB is also normalized logarithmically. The field runs from around one cent to over fourteen cents per GB — on a linear scale the cheapest offer would take full marks and practically everything else zero, so the criterion would only answer who is absolutely cheapest. On a log scale the gaps in the middle of the field stay visible too.

Providers without a rating

Roughly half the providers offering a block have no Trustpilot profile. They are not scored as zero, but they do take a markdown on that criterion. The reason: no profile is information in itself. The providers without reviews are the small ones and the new ones, and buying there carries a risk that a provider with hundreds of reviews has already retired.

The markdown works out at roughly 3.4 stars — clearly below the market average of 4.3, but far above the market's weakest rating of 1.6. A provider without a profile therefore loses a few places rather than being disqualified: one that is genuinely strong on price, retention and connections still makes the list. The row states plainly that no rating is available.

What else to check before buying a block

Two things appear in no table. First, how long the credit stays valid: most providers leave blocks valid indefinitely, some do cap them. Check this with the provider before buying. Second, the backbone. A block as a supplement only makes sense on a different backbone from your main access — two routes into the same article archive hit the same gaps. Which provider runs on which backbone is listed in the provider overview.

If customer satisfaction matters more to you than price per GB, the ranking of best-rated providers is the better starting point.