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Last updated: September 2026
What Is Wasabi Cloud Storage?
Wasabi is a cloud storage service that emphasizes simplicity and affordability. It offers a platform for storing data with high durability and availability. Wasabi positions itself as an alternative to traditional cloud providers by eliminating costs associated with data access and egress. The focus is on providing organizations with budget-friendly storage solutions.
Wasabi offers predictable expenses without unexpected charges often associated with data retrieval or API requests. The service accommodates various storage needs, making it suitable for organizations of various sizes seeking scalable, secure, and budget-conscious data storage.
In this article:
- What pricing models does Wasabi offer?
- How Are Wasabi Service Charges Calculated in the Pay as You Go Model?
- How much does each Wasabi service cost?
What pricing models does Wasabi offer?
Pay as You Go
The pay as you go pricing model allows customers to pay only for the storage they use, with no fixed subscription term. After a minimum usage commitment of 1 TB per month, customers can cancel their accounts at any time without penalties. This model includes the following terms:
- No charges for API requests or data ingress.
- No egress charges if the monthly egress amount is less than or equal to the amount of active storage in the account.
- A 90-day minimum storage duration is enforced for data.
For customers who need a longer-term commitment, the pay as you go – commit option is available. This variant requires a monthly storage commitment over a 1, 3, or 5-year subscription term. Customers pay the higher of their committed storage amount or actual usage, with any excess storage billed at the agreed-upon contract rate. The other terms remain the same, including no charges for API requests, ingress, or limited egress.
Reserved Capacity Storage
The reserved capacity storage (RCS) pricing model allows customers to purchase a fixed amount of storage for a set duration of 1, 3, or 5 years. This option provides lower pricing compared to the pay as you go model and offers customers predictable expenses. Key features include:
- No charges for API requests or data ingress.
- No egress charges if the monthly egress amount is less than or equal to the amount of active storage in the account.
- A 25 TB monthly minimum storage volume.
- A 30-day minimum storage duration for data.
Customers can increase their reserved capacity during their subscription term at the same discounted rate offered in the original agreement. If usage exceeds the reserved capacity, overages are billed monthly at the current rate.
For organizations that need strict control over their storage usage, the reserved capacity storage – capped model enforces a hard limit on storage consumption. If the reserved capacity is reached, additional uploads are blocked until capacity is freed or more storage is purchased.
How Are Wasabi Service Charges Calculated in the Pay as You Go Model?
Wasabi calculates service charges under the pay as you go pricing model based on several components that reflect data usage and storage policies:
- Timed active storage: This represents the amount of active storage used during the billing cycle. Charges are based on the total storage volume multiplied by the monthly rate. If usage falls below Wasabi’s minimum requirement of 1 TB, the customer is charged for the difference.
- Timed deleted storage: If data is deleted before meeting Wasabi’s 90-day minimum storage retention policy, the customer is billed for the remaining days in that period.
- Data transfer (ingress): Ingress refers to data uploaded into Wasabi’s cloud. While this usage is recorded and displayed on invoices, no charges are applied for ingress under the pay as you go model.
- Data transfer (egress): Egress refers to data downloaded from Wasabi’s cloud. Like ingress, this is displayed on the invoice, but no charges are applied as long as the egress amount does not exceed the total active storage in the account.
- API requests: API requests to Wasabi services are also tracked and displayed on invoices. However, no additional charges are applied for API operations under this pricing model.
Minimum active storage: If the total timed active storage during a billing cycle is below the 1 TB monthly minimum, Wasabi applies a charge to account for the difference between the minimum requirement and the actual usage.
- Leverage lifecycle policies to manage costs: Since Wasabi enforces a 90-day minimum storage duration, strategically using object lifecycle policies can help minimize charges. Archive or transition infrequently accessed data instead of deleting it prematurely.
- Monitor egress usage closely to avoid surprises: While Wasabi offers free egress up to the amount of stored data, exceeding this limit can trigger unexpected costs. Track egress patterns and use caching or CDN solutions.
- Use Wasabi Direct Connect for predictable performance: This can enhance performance and reduce dependency on public internet routing, which is particularly useful for enterprises transferring large volumes of data regularly.
- Bundle reserved capacity storage with long-term workloads: If the organization has predictable storage needs, committing to Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS) can provide significant cost savings. It’s best suited for archival, backups, and compliance-heavy datasets.
- Use Wasabi with immutable buckets for ransomware protection: This can prevent accidental or malicious data deletions. This is especially useful for compliance-driven industries like healthcare and finance.
How much does each Wasabi service cost?
Unlike cloud providers like AWS and Azure, Wasabi provides simple, flat-rate pricing, without complex tiers, and does not charge data egress fees.
Wasabi Object Storage Pricing
Wasabi’s object storage is priced at $7.99 per terabyte per month across North America, EMEA, and APAC regions. This includes free data ingress, egress, and API requests, subject to Wasabi’s free egress and API policies. For customers storing less than 1 TB of data, a minimum charge equivalent to 1 TB of storage is applied.
Storage is billed on a per-GB-per-day basis, calculated as $0.0078 GB/mo. Wasabi also enforces a 90-day minimum storage duration policy, where deleted files incur charges for the remaining days within this period.
Wasabi Cloud NAS Pricing
The Wasabi Cloud NAS pricing is set at $9.99 per terabyte per month, with the same regional pricing for North America, EMEA, and APAC. It also includes free ingress, egress, and API requests. However, there is a higher minimum monthly charge, tied to a requirement of storing at least 10 TB of active storage.
Wasabi Surveillance Cloud Pricing
Pricing for Wasabi Surveillance Cloud is available upon request and varies based on unique storage needs. This product meets the needs of video surveillance systems, allowing users to store high volumes of video data securely and affordably without transfer or API charges.
Wasabi AiR Pricing
The Wasabi Archive Immutable Repository (AiR) is only available through Wasabi’s reserved capacity storage (RCS) pricing model. It is designed for archiving data with stringent compliance and immutability requirements. Customers must commit to a fixed storage capacity over 1, 3, or 5 years. Pricing is available upon request.
Related content: Read our guide to Wasabi backup
What is Wasabi’s 90-day minimum storage duration?
Wasabi bills every object for at least 90 days, even if you delete it sooner. Store a 1 TB file and delete it after 10 days and you still pay for the remaining 80. The charge is per object, so it applies to the ones you removed, not to your account as a whole.
This is the line people miss when they compare Wasabi’s per-TB rate against S3, and it is why the two are not directly comparable on price alone. It also explains what Wasabi is built for. Data that churns daily is the wrong fit. Data you were always going to keep, which is what backups and archives are, hits the minimum without ever noticing it, because a 90-day retention policy costs nothing extra under a 90-day minimum.
Check your shortest retention policy before you model the cost. If anything in it deletes sooner than 90 days, price that data as though it lived the full 90.
Does Wasabi charge egress fees?
No. Wasabi does not bill egress or API requests as separate line items, and that is the main structural difference between its pricing and the hyperscalers’. With S3 or Azure Blob, the storage rate is only part of the bill and the rest depends on how often you read the data, which is the part nobody can forecast.
The practical consequence for backup is that a restore costs nothing to pull. Under a per-GB egress model, testing a large restore has a price attached, which is a quiet reason DR tests get skipped.
There is a condition worth knowing:
Free egress assumes you download no more than you store in a given month. Keep 100 TB with Wasabi and pull back 100 TB or less in a billing cycle and you are inside the policy. Go past that regularly and Wasabi reserves the right to limit or suspend the account.
For backup that ceiling is generous. You write far more than you read, and even restoring everything you hold in a single month lands on the line rather than over it. The use cases that break the policy are the ones Wasabi is not built for, like serving media to end users.
How do you back up to Wasabi with N2W?
Wasabi’s flat-rate pricing makes it a compelling choice for cost-conscious organizations. But for truly optimized, enterprise-grade cloud backup, you need a solution that goes beyond just storage. That’s where N2W comes in.
Wasabi as an air-gapped backup target
Wasabi’s value in a backup architecture is not only the price. It is that Wasabi is neither AWS nor Azure. A copy resting there sits with a different provider, different credentials and a different control plane, which is what an air gap actually means. A second copy inside the same cloud account as production shares its blast radius, however it is labelled.
N2W archives AWS or Azure backups into Wasabi and calls Wasabi’s own object lock on the copy rather than adding a lock of its own. The immutability belongs to the storage, so it holds even if the tool that wrote it is gone. Storage stays in your Wasabi account, on your bill, under your credentials.
✅ Multi-Cloud Backup & Recovery – Manage backups across AWS, Azure, and Wasabi from a single console—no more juggling multiple dashboards.
✅ Automated Backup Policies – Set up flexible backup schedules, automate disaster recovery, and ensure compliance with retention policies tailored to your needs.
✅ Cost-Saving Optimization – Slash backup costs with automated tiering, scheduled power-downs, and detailed cost tracking, helping you get the most out of Wasabi’s pricing model.
✅ Fast & Easy Restores – Recover individual files, folders, or entire servers in seconds, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.
Wasabi provides the storage—but N2W ensures you have a powerful, secure, and cost-effective backup strategy to go with it.
🔹 Ready to take control of your backups? Try N2W free.
Frequently asked questions
Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go rate starts at $7.99 per TB per month as of September 2026, with no separate charges for egress or API requests. Storage carries a 90-day minimum retention per object, so what you actually pay depends on how long your data lives, not the headline rate alone.
Wasabi bills every object for at least 90 days, even if you delete it sooner. Store a file and remove it after 10 days and you still pay for the remaining 80. The charge is per object, so it applies to the ones you deleted rather than to your account as a whole.
No. Wasabi does not bill egress or API requests as separate line items. The policy assumes you download no more than you store in a given month: keep 100 TB and pull back 100 TB or less in a billing cycle and you are inside it. Regularly exceeding that ratio gives Wasabi the right to limit or suspend the account.
On the storage rate, usually yes, and the gap widens once you count the egress and API charges S3 bills separately. It flips if your data churns faster than 90 days, because the minimum retention means paying for storage you are no longer using.
Pay-as-you-go is billed monthly at the published rate with a basic support plan. Reserved capacity is bought in one, three or five year terms, includes a premium support plan, and discounts further as the term and committed capacity grow. Neither charges for egress or API requests.
Yes, and it is a common way to keep a copy outside your primary cloud. N2W archives AWS or Azure backups into Wasabi and calls Wasabi’s own object lock on the copy, so the immutability belongs to the storage rather than the backup tool. The data stays in your Wasabi account, on your bill.