Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage Review — 80% Cheaper Than AWS S3, Zero Egress Fees

What is Wasabi?

Wasabi Technologies is an American cloud object storage company founded in 2017 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers — the same founders behind Carbonite. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, Wasabi offers S3-compatible object storage that can serve as a drop-in replacement for Amazon S3 at a fraction of the cost.

The company's core value proposition is straightforward: pay $7.99/TB/month with no surprise egress or API billing. Compare that to AWS S3 Standard at roughly $23/TB/month for storage alone — before egress fees that can run $90/TB or more — and the savings potential becomes immediately apparent, especially for bandwidth-heavy workloads.

Wasabi is purpose-built for organizations that need to store large volumes of data cost-effectively: media companies, backup service providers, SaaS developers building data pipelines, and enterprises running large-scale archival operations.

Pricing & Plans

Wasabi offers two main pricing models. All figures are sourced from wasabi.com as of July 2026:

Pricing as of July 2026 — verify current rates at wasabi.com/pricing

What's Included at No Extra Cost

• Data Egress: Free under the free egress policy (downloads must not exceed stored volume at a 1:1 ratio, or 100 TB/month absolute limit)
• API Requests: Free — GET, PUT, DELETE, LIST all included at no per-request charge
• Data Ingress: Free — unlimited uploads
• SSL/TLS: Included
• 11 nines durability: 99.999999999% data durability across all regions

Important Policy Caveats

• 90-Day Minimum Storage: Files deleted before 90 days are still billed for the remaining duration. Not suitable for frequently churned data or short lifecycle objects.
• 1 TB Monthly Minimum: Even if you store less than 1 TB, you pay $7.99/month.
• Egress Ratio Limit: Downloads exceeding the 1:1 stored-to-downloaded ratio may result in service limitations. Verify the current policy at wasabi.com.

Key Features

Full S3-Compatible API

Wasabi implements the Amazon S3 API in full, enabling a simple migration from AWS S3 — change the endpoint URL and credentials, and your existing S3 tools work immediately. AWS CLI, SDKs for all major languages, rclone, s3cmd, Cyberduck, and hundreds of other tools work out of the box.

Immutable Storage via Object Lock

Wasabi supports S3 Object Lock in both Compliance and Governance modes, allowing you to set WORM (Write Once Read Many) policies on objects. This is a critical feature for ransomware protection and regulatory compliance (HIPAA, SEC 17a-4, FINRA, etc.), making backup data immutable for a defined retention period.

Multi-User Access Control (IAM)

Wasabi supports S3-compatible IAM with granular bucket and object-level policies, multiple access key pairs, and pre-signed URLs for temporary access sharing. This is sufficient for most teams and multi-application environments without needing full AWS IAM complexity.

Versioning

Per-bucket versioning allows you to preserve, retrieve, and restore every version of every object stored. Useful for accidental deletion protection. Be mindful that versioning increases storage consumption — set lifecycle rules accordingly.

Backup Software Integration

Wasabi maintains native integrations or verified compatibility with hundreds of backup applications: Veeam, MSP360, Cohesity, Commvault, Veritas, Acronis, Arcserve, N2WS, and many more. If your current backup tool supports custom S3 endpoints, it almost certainly works with Wasabi.

Security & Compliance

• Server-side encryption (SSE-S3 and SSE-C)
• In-transit encryption via TLS 1.2+
• Bucket policies and ACLs
• CORS configuration
• SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA-eligible
• 11 nines durability per region

Storage Regions

One of Wasabi's notable advantages is uniform pricing across all regions — no price penalty for choosing an APAC region over US East.

APAC Regions (Recommended for Southeast Asia)

• ap-northeast-1: Tokyo, Japan
• ap-northeast-2: Osaka, Japan
• ap-southeast-1: Singapore — lowest latency for Thailand and Southeast Asia
• ap-southeast-2: Sydney, Australia

Americas Regions

• us-east-1, us-east-2 (Virginia)
• us-central-1 (Texas)
• us-west-1 (Oregon)
• ca-central-1 (Montreal, Canada)

Europe Regions

• eu-central-1 (Frankfurt, Germany)
• eu-central-2 (Amsterdam, Netherlands)
• eu-west-1 (London, UK)
• eu-west-2 (Paris, France)

Region list may be updated — see current regions at wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage/storage-regions

Wasabi vs AWS S3 vs Cloudflare R2

A factual side-by-side comparison of the three most popular S3-compatible object storage options. Data as of September 2026:

Prices and features subject to change — verify at each provider's official website. Data as of September 2026.

Real-World Cost Example: 10 TB Stored, 5 TB Downloaded per Month

Estimated figures — actual costs depend on API operation counts, request patterns, and provider promotions.

Pros & Cons

Who Is Wasabi Best For?

Ideal Use Cases

• Long-term backup: Organizations running Veeam, MSP360, Acronis, or similar tools that want to slash backup storage costs dramatically
• Media storage: Video production studios, media companies, and content creators storing large volumes of raw footage and images
• Data archiving: Compliance-driven archiving where data must be retained long-term but may need occasional access (not deep cold archive)
• AWS S3 migrations: Teams currently on AWS S3 who want the same API without the billing shock
• Developers building storage-heavy apps: Cost-effective S3-compatible storage for production applications with moderate-to-high download traffic

Not Ideal For

• Short-lived objects or frequently deleted data (90-day policy makes this expensive)
• Very small storage volumes under 1 TB/month (minimum charge makes it less attractive)
• Workloads requiring a built-in CDN
• AWS Lambda event triggers or tight AWS-native service integrations
• Sustained download ratios exceeding 1:1 stored-to-downloaded

Getting Started with Wasabi

Migration from AWS S3 to Wasabi is straightforward. Here is a typical setup for Southeast Asia users:

1. Create an account at wasabi.com and add a payment method.
2. Create a bucket in ap-southeast-1 (Singapore) for the lowest latency from Thailand and SEA.
3. Generate Access Keys in the Wasabi console under Access Keys.
4. Configure your endpoint: use s3.ap-southeast-1.wasabisys.com as the S3 endpoint URL.
5. Test with AWS CLI or rclone:

   aws configure --profile wasabi
   # Enter your Wasabi Access Key ID and Secret Access Key
   # Region: ap-southeast-1
   
   aws s3 ls s3://your-bucket-name \
     --profile wasabi \
     --endpoint-url https://s3.ap-southeast-1.wasabisys.com

6. Migrate from AWS S3 (if applicable): use rclone sync or aws s3 sync with dual-profile configuration.
7. Point your backup application to the Wasabi S3 endpoint and credentials in the settings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Verdict: Is Wasabi Worth It?

For the right workloads, Wasabi is one of the most compelling value propositions in cloud object storage today. At $7.99/TB/month with a full S3-compatible API and zero egress billing, the total cost of ownership for backup-heavy or media-heavy use cases can be 70-80% lower than AWS S3.

The 90-day minimum storage policy is the most important constraint to evaluate before migrating. If your data is frequently created and deleted, the actual cost may be higher than the headline rate suggests. Model your specific access patterns carefully.

For long-term backup, media storage, compliance archiving, and cost-conscious S3 migrations — Wasabi is strongly worth evaluating.