Cloud Parts

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage

S3-compatible object storage sold at one flat price per TB, with no egress or request fees.

What it is
Object storage
Type
Commercial product
Made by
Wasabi Technologies
License
Proprietary
Facts checked
5 October 2026
Website

What it is

Wasabi runs its own object storage in 16 regions across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific. Each region has its own endpoint, such as s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com for Frankfurt, and a bucket lives in the region you create it in. Wasabi describes its API as “100% bit-compatible” with Amazon S3 and IAM, so S3 SDKs, the aws CLI and backup software work after you change the endpoint and keys. There is one storage class: every object is “hot” and readable at once, with no archive tier to restore from. Buckets support versioning, Object Lock, lifecycle expiration and replication, and the service is designed for 11 nines of durability.

The bill has one line that matters: stored data. Pay as you go costs $7.99 per TB-month in North America and EMEA ($0.0078 per GB), with no fees for egress or API requests. The catches are in the minimums. You pay for at least 1 TB every month, even with an empty account. An object deleted or overwritten before it is 90 days old is billed for the remaining days as “Timed Deleted Storage”. Objects are billed as at least 4 KB. Free egress assumes you download no more each month than you store. Reserved Capacity prepays 1, 3 or 5 years for a discount, and Wasabi Fire, an NVMe class for AI and other latency-sensitive work, is sold by quote.

Why teams pick it

  • A predictable bill: no egress or per-request fees, so restores and full reads add no line items
  • About a third of the S3 Standard list price per TB ($7.99 against $23 in US East)
  • Every object is readable immediately, with no restore step or retrieval fee as on archive tiers
  • Object Lock and support in backup tools such as Veeam make it a common off-site backup target

Watch out for

  • 90-day minimum storage duration on pay as you go: data deleted or overwritten sooner is billed for the rest of the 90 days, so short-lived files can cost more than on S3
  • At least 1 TB is billed every month, and every object is billed as at least 4 KB
  • Free egress is a fair-use promise: if you download more each month than you store, your use case doesn’t qualify, which rules out heavy public downloads
  • A fair-use mechanism caps each account’s concurrent requests and bandwidth according to how much it stores
  • One hot class only: there is no cheaper archive tier for data you rarely read

Alternatives

What all object storage have in common →
Amazon S3AWSAWS’s object storage, and the de facto API most object stores copy.Apache OpenDALOpen sourceA Rust library, with bindings for Python, Java, Node.js, Go and more, that gives one API (read, write, stat, list, delete) over 50-plus storage backends: S3 and other object stores, local and HDFS file systems, Google Drive and Dropbox, and key-value stores.Apache OzoneOpen sourceA Hadoop-born object store that serves the same buckets over S3 and as a Hadoop file system.Azure Blob StorageAzureAzure’s object storage, with three blob types and an optional real directory tree for analytics.Backblaze B2 Cloud StorageCommercialLow-cost object storage on Backblaze’s own hardware, with its own API and an S3-compatible one.CephOpen sourceA distributed storage cluster that serves S3 buckets, block devices and a file system from the same pool of disks.Cloudflare R2CommercialS3-compatible object storage from Cloudflare that charges nothing for data going out.GarageOpen sourceA lightweight S3 object store that keeps copies of your data in several sites linked by ordinary Internet connections.Google Cloud StorageGoogle CloudGoogle Cloud’s object storage, where even the archive class answers in milliseconds.MinIOArchivedOpen sourceA self-hosted object store that speaks the S3 API. The open-source edition is archived and its images are gone from Docker Hub; MinIO now sells AIStor.PGSTY SiloOpen sourceA community-maintained fork of the open-source MinIO server, with builds, images, security fixes and the full web console.RustFSOpen sourceA young Rust reimplementation of MinIO’s design: S3-compatible, erasure-coded, Apache 2.0, and generally available since September 2026.SeaweedFSOpen sourceA distributed blob store with an S3 gateway and a file system layer, built to store and serve billions of small files.TigrisCommercialGlobally distributed S3-compatible object storage that moves data to where it’s read, with no egress fees.Versity S3 GatewayOpen sourceA stateless S3 server that exposes an existing file system, or another object store, through the S3 API.Zenko CloudServerOpen sourceScality’s open-source Node.js S3 server: a light S3 endpoint for development and tests, and a front end that can store objects in other clouds.

How it fits with other technologies

Use the aws CLI against a Wasabi region · bash

# every Wasabi region has its own endpoint; this one is Frankfurt
export WASABI="https://s3.eu-central-2.wasabisys.com"

aws s3api create-bucket --bucket acme-backups --object-lock-enabled-for-bucket \
  --endpoint-url "$WASABI" --profile wasabi

# keep every object version for 30 days; nobody can delete it sooner
aws s3api put-object-lock-configuration --bucket acme-backups \
  --object-lock-configuration '{"ObjectLockEnabled":"Enabled","Rule":{"DefaultRetention":{"Mode":"COMPLIANCE","Days":30}}}' \
  --endpoint-url "$WASABI" --profile wasabi

aws s3 cp pg-2026-10-05.dump.gz s3://acme-backups/postgres/ --endpoint-url "$WASABI" --profile wasabi
aws s3 ls s3://acme-backups/postgres/ --endpoint-url "$WASABI" --profile wasabi

Next to S3 and R2#

Wasabi, Backblaze B2 and Tigris all speak the S3 API, but they sell different things: Wasabi and B2 a low flat price per TB, Tigris data placed near whoever reads it. List prices, checked on 5 October 2026.

WasabiBackblaze B2TigrisAmazon S3 StandardCloudflare R2 Standard
Storage, per GB-month$0.0078 ($7.99 per TB)$0.00695 ($6.95 per TB)$0.02$0.023 (first 50 TB)$0.015
Egress to the internetFree while monthly egress stays at or below the data storedFree up to 3× the average data stored, then $0.01 per GB; free through partner CDNsFree$0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, after 100 GB freeFree
Request feesNoneFree, except Class D calls: $0.004 per 10,000 after 2,500 a day$0.005 per 1,000 writes, $0.0005 per 1,000 reads$0.005 per 1,000 writes, $0.0004 per 1,000 reads$4.50 per million writes, $0.36 per million reads
Minimum storage duration90 days (pay as you go)NoneNone (30 days Infrequent Access, 90 days Archive)None (30 to 180 days in colder classes)None (30 days Infrequent Access)
Other minimums, free allowance1 TB billed every month; objects billed as at least 4 KBFirst 10 GB free5 GB, 10,000 writes and 100,000 reads free each monthNo minimum charge; Free Tier credits for new accounts10 GB-month, 1 million writes and 10 million reads free each month
Regions16; each bucket lives in the region you pick4; chosen per account at sign-up and fixed8 behind one endpoint; Global buckets follow their readersEach bucket lives in the AWS Region you pickOne endpoint per account, region auto
  • Wasabi’s price is for North America and EMEA; the S3 prices are for US East (N. Virginia).
  • A minimum storage duration means an object deleted or overwritten sooner is still billed for the full period. On Wasabi it applies to all pay-as-you-go storage, not just a cold tier.

Where the 90-day minimum bites#

Wasabi’s own docs compare it with S3 Standard, which has no minimum: data deleted within about 23 days is cheaper on S3, and data kept longer is cheaper on Wasabi.

Good fit

kept for months

Backups with 30-day or longer retention, video archives, surveillance footage, datasets that are written once and read now and then.

Poor fit

short-lived

CI artifacts, temporary uploads, caches and logs kept for a week. Each deleted object is still billed until it reaches 90 days.

Hidden churn

overwrites

Overwriting a key is an implicit delete. Upload the same 1 MB object every day and up to 90 copies are billed at once.

Shorter minimum

30 days

Wasabi can switch an account from a 90-day to a 30-day minimum for new uploads; the docs say other pricing models carry different minimums and point you to sales.

See it in a real stack

No architecture uses Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage yet. Drop it into the playground and wire it up yourself.Open playground →
Where it came from2017–2026

David Friend and Jeff Flowers had already built five companies together, most recently Carbonite, the online backup service that went public in 2011. Friend thought cloud storage was turning into a commodity, like long-distance calls after MCI undercut AT&T, and wanted it to work like a utility: “My vision for cloud storage is that it will become like electricity. It will be one-size-fits-all.” They worked under the decoy name BlueArchive, then tried about 200 names before picking Wasabi, “because what we are doing is hot”.

Wasabi launched on 3 May 2017 from a single data center in Northern Virginia. It charged $0.0039 per GB-month with no egress fees, offered one class for primary, secondary and archive data, and claimed six times the speed of S3 at a fifth of the price. Immutable buckets were there from day one, because, Friend said, people lose data to “maliciousness, a virus, or a human error”, not to data-center failures.

The flat price kept selling. By September 2022 Wasabi had more than 40,000 customers and 13 regions, and a $250 million round valued it at over $1.1 billion. By January 2026 it stored more than 3 exabytes in 16 regions, and in April 2026 it bought Seagate’s Lyve Cloud business. The list price has roughly doubled since launch, to $7.99 per TB.

Why it’s built this way

One hot class instead of storage tiers
Friend wanted storage to be a simple utility. A single class means no retrieval fees, restore delays or lifecycle rules to plan around.
Charge for storage only
No egress or request fees makes the bill predictable. The price of that is the 90-day minimum and the fair-use egress rule, which keep out short-lived and download-heavy data.
Copy the S3 API exactly
Backup software, gateways and SDKs written for S3 work unchanged, so existing tools could add Wasabi as a target by changing an endpoint.
Immutable buckets from launch
Friend saw data lost to ransomware, malice and mistakes rather than hardware, so buckets could be locked against deletion for a set time.

Timeline

  1. 2017

    Launches on 3 May from one data center in Northern Virginia

  2. 2022

    $250 million round values it at over $1.1 billion; 13 regions

  3. 2025

    Announces Wasabi Fire, an NVMe class, and a San Jose region

  4. 2026

    Raises $70 million at $1.8 billion; buys Seagate’s Lyve Cloud business

Sources22 · facts checked 5 October 2026

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