Wasabi vs S3

Wasabi is a hot cloud storage provider offering S3-compatible object storage at roughly 80% less than AWS S3. The catch: a 90-day minimum storage charge and a data access policy. For the right workloads, Wasabi is a significant cost saver.

Pricing Deep Dive

Wasabi's pricing is simple: $0.0069/GB/month with free egress. No request fees. No per-operation charges. For 100 TB:

• Wasabi: $690/month
• S3 Standard: $2,300/month + egress + request fees

The savings are substantial. But there are catches.

The 90-Day Minimum

Wasabi charges a minimum of 90 days for every object stored. Upload a 1 GB file and delete it 5 days later — you still pay for 90 days. This makes Wasabi unsuitable for temporary files, build artifacts, or any data with short lifetimes.

For stable data (backups, archives, media libraries, compliance records), the 90-day minimum is irrelevant because the data stays longer anyway.

The Egress Policy

Wasabi's "free egress" has a fair use policy: monthly downloads should not exceed the amount of data stored. If you store 10 TB, downloading more than 10 TB/month may trigger overage or account review. This is fine for backup retrieval but limits use as a high-traffic CDN origin.

S3 charges $0.09/GB with no ratio policy. You pay more but with no access restrictions.

Feature Comparison

S3's feature depth (storage classes, lifecycle policies, analytics, replication) exceeds Wasabi. S3 Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099/GB/month is cheaper than Wasabi for truly cold data — but retrieval takes hours.

Wasabi has one tier with instant access. For data that needs to be always accessible at low cost, Wasabi is simpler than S3 Intelligent-Tiering.

In system design interviews, understanding storage economics shows practical architecture knowledge. See also: storage patterns and data management.