I'm not suggesting linode goes commie and gives it away for free, but it would be extremely nice to have a more flexible pricing policy. For that price, I'd prefer backing up crucial data every night to a separate partition and downloading it with a script weekly (actually, that's what I do). In general, what I'm saying is: for the projects that use VPS backups may not be as important to pay the offered price. I wonder what linode had in mind for that - maybe I'm wrong.