Wasabi

What Wasabi actually is

Wasabi is a pure-play object storage company — one product, priced flat, sold against AWS S3 on the two things that make S3 bills ugly: per-request charges and egress fees. The company was founded in 2017 by Carbonite co-founders David Friend and Jeff Flowers, runs out of Boston, and rents wholesale space in major colocation facilities rather than building its own data centers. In our /category/cloud-object-storage category it is the default recommendation when a reader's workload is "store a lot of bytes, read some of them, don't want a spreadsheet to predict the bill."

Technically it is an S3-compatible API target: buckets, objects, the standard S3 SDKs and CLI tools work against it, and most backup software (Veeam, MSP360, Synology, Duplicati, rclone) ships a Wasabi preset. You pick a region per bucket, and the data stays there. Wasabi runs 16 storage regions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific — including six in the US and Canada, six in Europe, and four in Asia — all in certified facilities (the company says SOC 2, ISO 27001, and PCI-DSS at its storage regions).

What it deliberately does not have: tiers. There is no Glacier-class cold tier, no Infrequent Access class, no retrieval fees, no per-class lifecycle math. Everything is "hot" storage at one price. That single design decision is both the product's appeal and its main limitation, and everything below follows from it.

Pricing: what you really pay

The headline number is real and public: $7.99 per TB per month for Pay-as-You-Go, flat across regions, with zero charges for egress or API requests. (Wasabi raised this from the long-standing $6.99 some time ago; older reviews still quote $6.99 and are stale.) Reserved Capacity Storage drops the per-TB rate through quote-only discounts on 1-, 3-, or 5-year commitments starting at 25 TB.

The fine print is where we focus our readers. First, there is a 1 TB minimum monthly charge on Pay-as-You-Go — you pay $7.99/month even if you store 200 GB. Second, objects deleted or overwritten before 90 days incur Timed Deleted Storage charges; Wasabi models this as a 90-day minimum storage duration, and it punishes churny workloads (CI artifact buckets, sync scratch space, frequently-rewritten logs) far more than the headline suggests. Reserved plans relax that to 30 days. Third, the billable object floor is 4 KB, so millions of tiny files inflate the real cost. Fourth, and this is the one most people miss: the "no egress fees" promise is subject to a fair-use policy — your monthly egress is not supposed to exceed your stored volume. As a backup target you will never notice; as a high-traffic CDN origin you can.

Against S3, the arithmetic is usually stark: S3 Standard is roughly $23/TB-month before you pay for requests and egress, so a 10 TB backup set running $230+/month on S3 lands at $79.90 on Wasabi. Against Backblaze B2 ($6/TB-month, with a free egress allowance up to your stored amount) the gap narrows, and the choice becomes more about ecosystem fit than headline price.

There is no permanent free tier — only a trial (100 GB for 30 days with a company email domain, 10 GB for 14 days with a freemail address). Budget the $7.99/month floor as a real recurring cost from day one.

Performance & infrastructure

Wasabi's pitch is "hot storage at cold-storage prices," and in our view the performance claim mostly holds for what it is: a single-tier object store that serves reads at S3-class latency with no retrieval delay, because there is no cold tier to wake up. We have not run our own fio-style object benchmarks against Wasabi, so we will not quote throughput figures — the honest statement is that for backup ingestion, restore jobs, and media serving at modest concurrency, the consistent complaint profile we track is not about speed.

Durability is handled by erasure coding across independent racks within a region, and cross-region replication is available as a paid option for teams that want geographic redundancy rather than a second backup copy. Region selection is per bucket and enforced, which makes data-residency claims auditable — the reason European customers pick eu-central-1 (Amsterdam) or eu-central-2 (Frankfurt) and keep their buckets pinned there.

The SLA is a real, credit-backed document: 99.9% monthly uptime, calculated from error rates on read/write/delete operations measured from multiple external locations per region, with service credits as the remedy. The exclusions are standard but worth reading — scheduled maintenance, third-party networks, and non-production environments are carved out. 99.9% is not heroic (AWS S3's standard is also 99.9% for availability, 99.99% for durability of design), but the credit mechanism is transparent and the status page is public.

One infrastructure nuance worth knowing: Wasabi is a smaller company than the hyperscalers it underprices, and its model depends on wholesale colocation contracts and high utilization. That is not a red flag — it has scaled to exabytes — but if your risk model demands a provider of AWS's financial scale, no amount of per-TB savings should override that.

Where it falls short

The 90-day minimum storage duration is the big one, and it is structural rather than a policy footnote. Any workload that writes, deletes, and rewrites within a quarter — backups with aggressive retention pruning, build caches, event streams — will see Timed Deleted Storage charges that quietly erase the price advantage. If your data is genuinely long-lived (backups, media archives, compliance stores), this never bites; if it is not, read the pricing page twice.

The 1 TB minimum monthly charge makes Wasabi a poor fit for tiny datasets. Storing 50 GB of website assets costs $7.99/month here and less than a dollar on S3 Infrequent Access or B2. Our advice: Wasabi's economics start making sense somewhere north of 500 GB and keep making sense into the hundreds of terabytes.

The fair-use egress ceiling quietly disqualifies one common use case. "Free egress" invites CDN-origin thinking, but a bucket serving far more traffic than it stores will get a conversation with Wasabi's abuse team. This is documented policy, not a hidden gotcha, but the marketing headline does not carry the asterisk.

There is also less of everything around the edges: one storage class, no native compute integration, no equivalent of S3 event triggers on the level of Lambda, and a support organization that gives Pay-as-You-Go customers the basic plan (Premium support is tied to Reserved Capacity contracts). Lock-in is modest thanks to the S3 API, though switching costs are real once petabytes are parked.

Who should pick this

Our pick for Wasabi is backup and archive storage: Veeam repositories, offsite copies of ZFS or Proxmox backups, media and footage archives, and any compliance store where data is written once and read rarely. The flat price and zero egress make restores predictable, and predictable restores are the entire point of backup storage.

It is also a good fit for SaaS teams serving user-uploaded content at moderate read volume, especially in Europe where per-bucket region pinning satisfies data-residency requirements without hyperscaler pricing.

We would not pick it for: churning scratch data (the 90-day rule), sub-terabyte datasets (the 1 TB floor), hot CDN origin duties (the fair-use egress policy), or cold archival with rare retrieval needs (no cold tier means you are paying hot prices for data a Glacier-class product would store for less). In those cases B2, S3 IA/Glacier tiers, or Cloudflare R2 are more honest matches.

Key takeaways

• Flat $7.99 per TB per month, all regions, with genuinely zero egress and API request charges — but under a fair-use policy that caps monthly egress near your stored volume.
• 90-day minimum storage duration and a 1 TB monthly minimum are the real pricing traps; churning or sub-terabyte workloads can lose the price advantage entirely.
• S3-compatible API with 16 regions across the Americas, Europe, and Asia-Pacific; region pinned per bucket for auditable data residency.
• 99.9% credit-backed uptime SLA with published error-rate methodology; no permanent free tier, only a 30-day trial.
• Single hot tier only — no cold storage class, so it beats Glacier on access cost but loses badly if retrieval is rare.
• In our view the default offsite backup target for teams storing 500 GB to hundreds of TB; compare Backblaze B2 below that and hyperscalers never.

Sources

• https://wasabi.com/pricing
• https://wasabi.com/company
• https://docs.wasabi.com/docs/where-is-my-data-stored-and-how-are-wasabis-storage-regions-secured
• https://wasabi.com/legal/sla