Below are some (FAQs) Frequently Asked Questions pertaining to Wasabi pricing. If you have additional questions regarding our pricing, please contact us.
3. Does Wasabi have any minimum monthly storage charges or minimal storage retention periods?
4. How do I know if Wasabi’s free egress pricing model is a fit for my use case?
5. How are my Wasabi usage charges calculated?
7. What is the cost impact of using Wasabi versioning and bucket logging features?
9. What is the cost impact of using Wasabi’s immutability feature for compliance purposes?
11. What is the math behind the $5.99 / TB / month?
13. What is the basis for the pricing claim that Wasabi is ‘80% less than AWS S3’?
14. Is Wasabi’s pricing always based on USD (U.S. Dollars)?
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Wasabi is priced at $5.99 TB/month (which is based on $.0059 GB/month) with no additional charges for egress or API requests. This pricing applies to all current Wasabi service regions including us-east, us-west, and eu-central. This pricing does not include taxes or additional services such as Wasabi's premium support plan.
2. I was a Wasabi customer prior the implementation of the $5.99 per TB/month pricing plan on March 5, 2019 - what pricing model applies to my use case?
Wasabi will honor your previous pricing model for as long as you remain a Wasabi customer.
3. Does Wasabi have any minimum monthly storage charges or minimal storage retention periods?
Wasabi has a minimum monthly charge associated with 1 TB of storage ($5.99/month). If you store less than 1 TB of active storage in your account, your total charge will still be $5.99/month.
Wasabi also has a minimum 90 day storage retention period that means stored objects that are deleted before they have been stored with Wasabi for 90 days will incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days (see FAQ#6 for more details). This policy is comparable to the minimum storage charge period applicable to some of the AWS and other object storage services.
4. How do I know if Wasabi’s free egress pricing model is a fit for my use case?
Wasabi’s free egress pricing model is designed for use cases where you store your data in service and you access this data at a reasonable rate. If your use case creates an unreasonable burden on our infrastructure, we will work you on an alternative pricing model.
We often get asked what is your definition of ‘reasonable rate’ and/or ‘unreasonable burden’. To answer this question, it’s best to consider these guidelines:
If your monthly downloads (egress) are less than or equal to your active storage volume, then your storage use case is a good fit for Wasabi’s free egress pricing model.
If your monthly downloads (egress) are greater than your active storage volume, then your storage use case is not a good fit for Wasabi’s free egress pricing model (and you may need to work with us on an alternative model)
For example, if you store 100 TB with Wasabi and download 100 TB or less within a monthly billing cycle, then your storage use case is a good fit for our free egress pricing model. If your monthly downloads exceed 100 TB, then your use case is is not a good fit for this pricing model.
If your storage use case exceeds the guidelines of our free egress pricing model on a regular basis, we reserve the right to work with you on an alternative pricing model and/or limit your egress traffic. These actions would be taken after informing you of the condition via a customer service notification. Please note we often have excess egress bandwidth available for customer usage and it is our goal to not apply any egress limits except in cases of where the egress used regularly exceeds our guidelines.
5. How are my Wasabi usage charges calculated?
The Wasabi usage charges are calculated in accordance with the terms described below.
Timed Active Storage: This item is associated with the amount active storage that is stored with Wasabi for the billing cycle. The unit price of $.00019 per GB per day is based on Wasabi’s published storage charge of $.0059 per GB per month divided by 30 days. Wasabi always bills on a 30-day cycle (regardless of the length of the month or when the billing cycle starts).
Minimum Active Storage (if applicable): In the event the Timed Active Storage charge is less than $5.99, a charge for the difference between Wasabi’s $5.99 monthly minimum and the monthly Timed Active Storage is applied. Timed Deleted Storage (described below) does not count in the calculation of whether Wasabi’s minimum 1 TB per month requirement is met.
Timed Deleted Storage: This item is associated with the amount of deleted storage that has not yet reached the 90-day minimum storage charge with Wasabi for the billing cycle. Wasabi charges a minimum of 90 days for any storage object. This policy is comparable to the minimum storage charge period applicable to some of AWS’s object storage services. The unit price for timed deleted storage is the same as the unit price for timed active storage. For more details on how Timed Deleted Storage works, please see FAQ#6.
Data Transfer (Out): This item is associated with the amount of data (storage data and the data consumed by API calls) that leave (egress) the Wasabi Service. With Wasabi’s free egress pricing model, we do not charge for data transfer (out).
For more info on how to understand Wasabi usage charges, please review this section of our knowledge base.
6. Can you provide more details on Wasabi’s 90 day minimum storage policy? Given this policy, when does it make sense (or not make sense) to use Wasabi vs. AWS S3 for my storage use case?
As explained in FAQ#3, Wasabi has a minimum 90 day storage retention period that means stored objects that are deleted before they have been stored with Wasabi for 90 days will incur a pro-rated charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. This policy is comparable to the minimum storage charge period applicable to some AWS storage classes.
To better understand how the 90 day minimum storage policy works, let’s consider an example.
- An object is stored in Wasabi on Day 1
- On Day 16, this object is deleted from Wasabi
In this example, you have a scenario where you will billed for:
- 15 days of Active Storage
- 75 days of Deleted Storage
On a related note, we sometimes get asked about the impact of Wasabi’s 90 day minimum retention period on our cost comparisons with AWS S3. Although some AWS storage classes (i.e. AWS Glacier) have similar minimum retention policies, AWS S3 ‘standard’ does not. The best way to answer this question is to compare the costs when 100 TB is stored in Wasabi and AWS S3.
As shown in this example, if you delete the 100 TB of storage in less than 23 days, Wasabi will be more expensive than AWS S3. However, if you store the 100 TB of data for more than 23 days, Wasabi will be less expensive than AWS S3. After the first year, AWS S3 is ~4x more expensive than Wasabi (and that is before you include the extra charges that AWS applies for egress and API requests).
In summary, if you have data that you only need to keep for short periods of time before deletion, then it may be more cost effective for you to keep this data in AWS. However, as shown in this example, if you keep the data for more than 23 days, Wasabi is the more cost effective solution.
7. What is the cost impact of using Wasabi versioning and bucket logging features?
Versioning is an object storage feature that is available from Wasabi as well as AWS S3. Any time you enable versioning (on Wasabi or AWS S3), you are essentially creating new versions of the objects you are storing. This will result in an increase in storage charges. Bucket logging is another object storage feature that is available from Wasabi and AWS S3. As the feature name implies, when this feature is enabled, you will be creating log files for all bucket activity. These log files are treated just like any other type of billable storage.
8. I’m not planning to use the versioning feature but I may be overwriting a file (via API delete & put actions) with the same name multiple times. What is the cost impact of this?
As a means of answering this question, let’s consider an example where on day 1, you store a file called “foo.pdf”. On day 2, you then overwrite foo.pdf with a new copy of foo.pdf but do not change the file name or use versioning. As part of this overwrite action, the original copy of foo.pdf will transition from active storage to deleted storage. This will result in a charge for this particular object of 1 day of active storage and 89 days of deleted storage. In addition, you will be charged for storage of the new copy of foo.pdf.
9. What is the cost impact of using Wasabi’s immutability feature for compliance purposes?
Immutability means the stored objects cannot be deleted by the user or by Wasabi until the specified retention period has expired (this is a security feature for data protection). Any storage (immutable or not) will be charged as active storage.
10. What is the cost impact of using Wasabi to store very small files (less than 4 kilobytes in size)?
If you use Wasabi to store files that are less than 4 kilobytes (KB) in size, you should be aware that Wasabi’s minimum file size from a charging perspective is 4 KB. You can store files smaller than 4 KB with Wasabi but (for example), if you store a 2 KB file with Wasabi, you will be charged as if it were a 4 KB file.
This policy is due to the processing overhead that each file that is less than 4 KB requires in Wasabi storage. This minimum file size charging policy only applies to files that are less than 4 KB in size. This policy is comparable to minimum capacity charge per object policies in use by some AWS storage classes (for example, AWS S3 IA has a minimum capacity charge of 128K).
11. What is the math behind the $5.99 / TB / month?
The math behind the $5.99 / TB / month price is as follows:
$.00019498 GB/day * 30 days in a Wasabi billing cycle * 1024 GB-in-a-TB = $5.99 per TB per month
Please visit this knowledge base article for a discussion on GB/TB vs. GiB/TiB.
12. What pricing for AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage are you using in your pricing comparisons?
Wasabi uses publicly-available competitor pricing in our comparisons. Based on our interpretation of competitor pricing as of January 2019, the following pricing is used:
AWS S3: $.023/GB/mo for storage & $.09/GB for egress
Google Cloud Storage: $.026/GB/mo for storage & $.08/GB for egress
Microsoft Azure Blob Storage: $.0184/GB/mo for storage & $.01/GB for egress
Wasabi acknowledges that there is some variability in our competitors complex pricing based on which specific tier, volume, and other parameters that are used. If you wish to better understand the pricing for one of our competitors for your specific storage use case, we recommend you use the storage pricing calculators from those providers.
13. What is the basis for the pricing claim that Wasabi is ‘80% less than AWS S3’?
To better explain this comparison statement, let’s consider a simple example for 1 TB of storage and 10% of this storage downloaded per month (100 GB):
AWS S3= [$.023/GB/mo (storage) * 1024 GB/TB] + [$.09/GB (egress) * 100 GB] = $34.24
Wasabi= [$.0059/GB/mo (storage) * 1024 GB/TB] + [$.00/GB (egress) * 100 GB] = $6.04
Wasabi’s total charges of $6.04 are 82.4% less than AWS S3’s total charge of $34.24
Note that this is a simple example that doesn’t factor in additional AWS charges regarding API requests and other fees. For a more detailed examination of AWS S3 pricing, please review the AWS pricing calculator that can be found here.
14. Is Wasabi’s pricing always based on USD (U.S. Dollars)?
Yes. We are working on a plan to offer pricing and invoicing in currencies other than USD in the future.
15. Where can I get more information on other pricing-related FAQs and info regarding Wasabi’s usage reporting and billing capabilities?
Please visit the Wasabi Knowledge Base section on this topic.