Wasabi Costs: What the No-Egress-Fee Model Actually Covers

The dangerous part of estimating Wasabi costs is not the arithmetic. It is assuming that “$7.99 per TB, no egress fees” applies to every storage shape and every delivery pattern without conditions.

How much does Wasabi cost? Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage Pay-Go starts at $7.99 per TB per month, with no separate line item for ingress, qualifying egress, or qualifying API requests. The practical bill can still be higher than stored capacity suggests because Pay-Go has a 1 TB monthly minimum, a 90-day minimum storage duration, and usage policies that make sustained high-egress delivery a poor fit; a storage-plus-CDN architecture prices that workload more directly.

This guide turns the headline into a cost model you can use for backups, media libraries, application assets, and migration planning. All figures are in USD and reflect public information checked on August 18, 2026.

Wasabi costs at a glance

Wasabi keeps the visible price table short. Its current Pay-Go pricing FAQ lists object storage at $7.99 per TB per month, or about $0.0078 per GB-month when a TB is treated as 1,024 GB. Ingress, egress, and API requests are shown as free, subject to Wasabi’s policies.

The current $7.99 price matters because many reviews and comparison pages still quote $6.99. Wasabi’s May 2026 pricing notice says affected Pay-Go and new accounts moved to $7.99 across North America, EMEA, and APAC on July 1, 2026. Existing contracted pricing can differ, so use the rate on your agreement or invoice when it overrides public Pay-Go.

What do Wasabi costs include at $7.99 per TB?

The base line item is hot object-storage capacity. Wasabi does not split ordinary Pay-Go capacity into hot, cool, and archive tiers, which makes the first estimate simpler than a hyperscaler bill.

For an account above the minimum, the starting formula is:

monthly active-storage cost = average active TB × $7.99

That produces these capacity-only estimates:

These examples assume a stable amount of data, Pay-Go pricing, no taxes or optional services, and no early deletion. They are a baseline, not a forecast.

Ingress is free on the Wasabi invoice

Wasabi lists data transfer into its service at $0. That removes a destination-side migration fee, but it does not erase a charge imposed by the cloud or data center you are leaving. If you move objects from another provider, price that provider’s outbound transfer and request fees separately.

Egress has no per-GB charge, but it has a fit test

Wasabi’s pricing page says there is no charge for egress or API requests. The more detailed policy says your use case is a good fit when monthly egress is less than or equal to active storage volume. If egress regularly exceeds active storage, Wasabi says it may limit or suspend the service.

That distinction is important. This is not a metered overage where every extra GB receives a published price. It is a workload-policy boundary, so a 10 TB backup repository with occasional restores fits the model better than a 10 TB origin serving 50 TB every month.

API requests are free for suitable applications

There is no standard PUT, GET, LIST, or DELETE request line item on Pay-Go. The free-API policy is still conditional: validated commercial applications generally comply, while a non-validated application that places an inefficient, unreasonable load on the service may be limited or suspended.

Do not translate “no API request fees” into “request design does not matter.” Inventory tools, media packagers, backup scanners, and small-object workloads should be tested against real request rates before a production cutover.

S3 compatibility reduces migration work, not billing analysis

Wasabi’s S3 API reference describes compatibility with AWS S3 and IAM APIs, so many SDKs, gateways, and backup applications can connect by changing credentials, region, and endpoint. That is operationally useful, but S3 compatibility does not mean the two services have the same storage classes, integrations, policies, or invoice structure.

Use a feature and API compatibility test in addition to a copy-cost estimate. Our S3-compatible storage guide covers the portability questions that a low per-TB number cannot answer.

Which Wasabi costs sit below the headline?

Four rules can change the effective price even though Wasabi does not add ordinary egress or request line items.

1. The 1 TB monthly minimum

Pay-Go accounts have a minimum monthly charge equal to 1 TB of active storage. Store 40 GB, 400 GB, or nothing in an open paid account and the capacity floor can still apply. Wasabi’s documentation specifically warns that the 1 TB minimum continues when there is no active storage until the account is deleted.

At 100 GB active, a $7.99 floor means an effective $0.0799 per stored GB for that month—more than ten times the displayed $0.0078-per-GB conversion. Small accounts should compare minimum spend, not unit price.

2. The 90-day minimum storage duration

For Pay-Go, every object carries a 90-day minimum storage duration. Delete an object before day 90 and the remaining days become “timed deleted storage” on the invoice. Wasabi’s minimum storage duration documentation explains that the charge is based on the object’s size and the time left in its minimum period.

In a simplified example, 1 TB uploaded and deleted after 10 days can still produce roughly 90 days of storage charges: 10 active days plus 80 deleted days. At the current headline rate, that is about $23.97 across the full 90-day window, before considering the account minimum or other active data.

The rule is applied to objects, not just buckets. Deleting a bucket does not erase the timed-deleted obligation created by young objects.

3. Overwrites and versions create billable bytes

Replacing video/master.mp4 with a new object does not make the previous bytes financially disappear. Wasabi’s FAQ says an overwrite transitions the original copy to deleted storage, so it can accrue the remainder of its minimum duration while the replacement begins a new duration.

Versioning adds another capacity layer because retained versions are stored objects. Bucket logging also writes objects. For a repository with frequently replaced media manifests, thumbnails, database dumps, or synthetic-full backups, estimate logical writes and object age—not only the final bucket size.

4. Objects smaller than 4 KB are billed as 4 KB

Wasabi applies a 4 KB minimum billable size per object. A workload with billions of 1 KB records can therefore have roughly four times as many billable bytes as its raw payload suggests, even before replication or metadata outside the object store is considered.

This rule is usually irrelevant for video and backup archives. It matters for telemetry fragments, thumbnails, logs, and application designs that create enormous counts of tiny objects.

Calculate Wasabi costs from workload shape

A useful estimate needs four inputs: capacity, churn, delivery, and operations. Build a monthly worksheet instead of multiplying today’s bucket size by $7.99.

Step 1: Measure timed active storage

Use daily or hourly storage observations if the data set changes materially during the month. Average active capacity is more accurate than a month-end snapshot.

Then apply the account floor:

billable active storage = max(average active storage, 1 TB minimum)

For multi-region copies or application-managed replicas, count every independently stored copy that appears as capacity.

Step 2: Estimate timed deleted storage

Group deleted or overwritten objects by size and age. For each group, estimate the days remaining before 90 days:

timed deleted TB-days = deleted TB × (90 − age at deletion in days)

Convert TB-days to the billing basis shown by Wasabi, then add it to active-storage charges. Backup retention policies deserve special attention: daily synthetic fulls or immutable copies can consume and retire far more physical storage than the latest visible restore point.

Step 3: Calculate the egress-to-storage ratio

Use bytes downloaded from Wasabi, not end-viewer traffic reported by a CDN. A cache can serve many viewer bytes from one origin fetch, while a low cache-hit ratio can pull the same segments repeatedly.

egress ratio = monthly Wasabi egress ÷ average active Wasabi storage

Ratios at or below 1:1 fit Wasabi’s published guideline. A recurring ratio above 1:1 should be treated as an architecture warning, not modeled as an automatic $0 overage.

For media delivery, improve cache efficiency or price a provider designed to charge explicitly for outbound traffic. The S3 egress cost guide explains how origin transfer, cache misses, and delivery traffic interact.

Step 4: Profile request behavior

Record monthly operations, peak requests per second, object sizes, multipart behavior, and the applications generating calls. API requests may remain a $0 invoice item, but an inefficient access pattern can still fail the policy fit test or become an operational bottleneck.

Step 5: Add migration and optional-service costs

Include source egress, transfer tools or appliances, parallel-run storage, verification, support, private connectivity, taxes, and engineering time. A migration can temporarily double stored capacity while both systems remain live.

When Wasabi storage pricing works—and when it does not

The strongest Wasabi fit is stable data larger than 1 TB, retained for at least 90 days, with monthly downloads no higher than active storage. Backups, long-lived media masters, surveillance archives, and disaster-recovery copies often have that shape.

The mistake is asking whether Wasabi is “cheap” in the abstract. It is cheap for a particular geometry: enough capacity to clear the floor, enough retention to clear 90 days, and restrained reads relative to stored bytes.

Wasabi costs vs. a delivery-oriented storage and CDN model

Wasabi bundles suitable egress into its storage price. A delivery-oriented platform separates durable origin capacity from CDN transfer, which can be easier to forecast when the whole purpose of the data is to be downloaded repeatedly.

This is the point where ZeroBuffer becomes relevant: its pricing model charges $0.01/GB per month per storage replica and starts CDN delivery at $0.0049/GB, with no minimum commitment or contract. That model costs more than Wasabi’s headline rate for capacity alone, but it states the delivery cost directly and is designed for assets that should be served repeatedly across regions rather than kept behind a 1:1 egress-fit guideline.

Do not compare $7.99/TB of storage with $0.0049/GB of CDN transfer as if they were substitutes. Price the full path: retained origin bytes, replica count, cache-hit ratio, viewer transfer, requests, encoding, and the operational features the workload needs.

A practical media example

Suppose a library holds 10,000 GB and delivers 30,000 GB per month.

• On Wasabi, capacity begins at $79.90, but a recurring 3:1 egress ratio does not fit the published free-egress guideline. There is no public per-GB overage rate to make that architecture predictable.
• In a one-replica storage-plus-CDN model at $0.01/GB-month and $0.0049/GB delivered, the same raw volumes begin at $100 storage plus $147 delivery, or $247 before taxes and any other services.

The second number is higher than $79.90 because it actually prices the delivery workload. The decision is not “which storage line is smaller?” It is “which provider publishes and supports the workload I will run?”

A pre-migration checklist for Wasabi S3

Before copying production data, answer these questions with measurements:

1. What is the average active capacity, and does it exceed 1 TB?
2. What percentage of bytes are deleted or overwritten before day 90?
3. How much timed deleted storage would the current retention policy create?
4. What is monthly origin egress divided by average active storage?
5. Is the application validated by Wasabi, and what request pattern does it generate?
6. How many objects are below 4 KB?
7. Which S3 operations, IAM behaviors, lifecycle rules, and integrations are required?
8. What does the source provider charge to move the first copy out?
9. Will both platforms run in parallel during validation?
10. Is the workload primarily storage, or is it really a content-delivery system?

Run a representative pilot for at least one billing cycle if the migration is material. Include deletes, overwrites, restores, cache misses, and peak request behavior—not just uploads and a single download test.

Frequently asked questions

How much is Wasabi per month?

Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage Pay-Go starts at $7.99 per TB per month under current public pricing. A paid Pay-Go account has a 1 TB monthly minimum, so storing less than 1 TB can still cost at least $7.99 before taxes and optional services.

Is Wasabi egress really free?

Wasabi does not publish a per-GB egress charge for suitable use cases. Its free-egress policy says monthly downloads should be less than or equal to active storage; regular use beyond that guideline can lead Wasabi to limit or suspend service, so high-egress origins need a delivery plan rather than a presumed $0 overage.

Why is Wasabi charging me when I have no active storage?

The 1 TB monthly minimum can continue on an open paid account even when active storage is zero. Timed deleted storage can also remain billable when objects were deleted before completing the 90-day minimum duration.

Does Wasabi charge for API requests?

Qualifying API requests do not receive a standard per-request charge. Wasabi says validated commercial applications generally comply with its policy, while inefficient non-validated applications that create an unreasonable load may be limited or suspended.

Is Wasabi S3-compatible?

Yes. Wasabi implements S3- and IAM-compatible APIs for common object-storage tools and SDKs, but compatibility should be tested operation by operation because provider features, limits, policies, and surrounding cloud integrations differ.

What happens if I delete Wasabi objects before 90 days?

For Pay-Go objects, Wasabi bills timed deleted storage for the time remaining in the 90-day minimum duration. An object deleted after 20 days can therefore accrue charges corresponding to the remaining 70 days.

Is Wasabi good for video streaming?

It can be a sensible store for long-lived video masters or an origin with efficient caching when Wasabi egress stays within the published guideline. A direct high-volume streaming origin that repeatedly delivers more bytes than it stores needs a CDN or another model with explicit, supported delivery pricing.

Conclusion: choose from the invoice you will create

Wasabi costs are predictable when the workload matches the contract behind the headline: at least 1 TB, objects kept for 90 days, reasonable API behavior, and monthly egress no greater than active storage. In that shape, $7.99/TB with no separate qualifying egress or request charge is easy to budget.

For small, short-lived, overwrite-heavy, or delivery-heavy data, the effective cost or policy risk changes. Model timed deleted bytes and the egress ratio first; if the data exists to be served repeatedly, compare Wasabi with an explicit storage-plus-CDN bill instead of forcing a content-delivery workload into a backup-shaped price.

Use the CDN cost calculator to price the delivery side, then test your real cache-hit ratio and origin egress before committing the migration.

If the answer is that your data exists to be delivered, ZeroBuffer prices that directly: S3-compatible storage at $0.01/GB-month per replica and flat CDN delivery from $0.0049/GB priced by volume rather than geography—with no 1 TB account floor, no 90-day minimum duration, and no egress-to-storage ratio to stay under. Origin shielding, instant purge, and multi-rendition encoding are included, and there are no contracts or minimums. See the full rate card.