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Wasabi Pricing FAQs

Below are some (FAQs) Frequently Asked Questions pertaining to Wasabi cloud storage pricing. If you have additional questions regarding our pricing, please contact us.

 

Introduction

This FAQ has been prepared to assist our customers understand Wasabi’s pricing model and related policies. Unless otherwise specified, these FAQs apply to both Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go and Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS) pricing models. If you have questions about our pricing policies that are not addressed here or have questions about our billing and payment policies, please refer to this section of the Wasabi Knowledge Base.

 

1. How much does Wasabi cost?

The standard price associated with Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model is $5.99 TB/month with no additional charges for egress or API requests. This price applies to all current Wasabi storage regions. This price does not include applicable taxes or additional optional services such as Wasabi’s premium support plan and Wasabi Direct Connect.

Wasabi also offers a Reserved Capacity Storage (RCS) pricing model that allows you to purchase 50 TB or more capacity for 1, 3, or 5 year terms. This pricing model provides additional savings relative to Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go-pricing model. Additional information on the Wasabi RCS pricing model can be found here and FAQs specific to RCS can be found here.

 

2. Does Wasabi have a minimum monthly storage charge?

For customers that use Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model, 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 (plus any applicable taxes). See FAQ#4 for more details.

For customers that use Wasabi’s RCS pricing model, the minimum capacity is 50 TB.

 

3. How do I know if Wasabi’s free egress policy is a fit for my use case?

Wasabi’s free egress policy is designed for use cases where you store your data with Wasabi, you access this data at a reasonable rate, and your use case does not impose an unreasonable burden on our service. To better understand the definition of ‘reasonable rate’ and ‘unreasonable burden’ in this context, please 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 policy.
  • 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 policy.

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 policy. If your monthly downloads exceed 100 TB, then your use case is not a good fit.

If your storage use case exceeds the guidelines of our free egress policy on a regular basis, we reserve the right to limit or suspend your service.  

 

4. How are my Wasabi usage charges calculated?

For customers using the Wasabi pay-as-you-go pricing model, Wasabi usage charges are calculated in accordance with the terms described below.

Timed Active Storage: This item is associated with the amount of active storage that is stored with Wasabi for the billing cycle. A customer invoice will show a unit price of $.00019499 per GB per day (which is based on Wasabi’s standard price of $5.99 TB per month divided by 30 days per month divided by 1024 GB per TB). By default, Wasabi bills on a 30-day cycle (regardless of the length of the month or when the billing cycle starts).

Timed Deleted Storage: This item is associated with the amount of deleted storage that has not yet reached the minimum storage retention period with Wasabi for the billing cycle (see FAQ#5 for more details). The unit price for Timed Deleted Storage is the same as the unit price for Timed Active Storage.

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. For example, if you have 512 GB stored for a month (50% of Wasabi’s monthly minimum), you will incur a Timed Active Storage charge of approximately $3.00 and a Minimum Active Storage charge of $2.99 (the balance of $5.99 minus $3.00 for Timed Active Storage). Timed Deleted Storage does not count in the calculation of whether Wasabi’s minimum 1 TB per month requirement is met.

Data Transfer (Out): This item is associated with the amount of data (storage data and the data consumed by API requests) that leaves (egresses) the Wasabi Service. With Wasabi’s free egress policy, we do not charge for data transfer (out) but the volume of egress is shown on the customer’s invoice.

For customers using the Wasabi RCS pricing model, Wasabi usage charges are based on the following criteria:

  • If you have purchased a 100 TB / 1 year term RCS package (for example), then on a monthly basis you can utilize up to 100 TB of Timed Active or Timed Deleted Storage without incurring any overage charges.
  • If in this example, the Timed Active Storage + Timed Deleted Storage exceeds 100 TB per month, then you will incur overage charges based on the pay-as-you-go price.

 

5. What is Wasabi’s minimum storage retention policy?

Wasabi has a minimum storage retention policy that means if stored objects are deleted before they have been stored with Wasabi for a certain number of days, a Timed Deleted Storage charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days will apply. This policy is comparable to the minimum storage duration policies that exist with some AWS and other hyperscaler storage services.

With Wasabi minimum storage retention policy, minimum number of days are as follows:

  • 90 days (default) for customers using Wasabi’s pay-as-you-go pricing model
  • 30 days for customers using Wasabi’s RCS pricing model

FAQ#6 provides an example of how this policy works.

 

6. Can you provide more details on Wasabi’s minimum storage retention policy? Given this policy, when does it make sense (or not make sense) to use Wasabi vs. AWS S3 for my storage use case?

To better understand how the minimum storage retention policy works, let’s consider an example (a 90 day policy is used in this 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 Timed Active Storage
  • 75 days of Timed Deleted Storage

On a related note, we sometimes get asked about the impact of Wasabi’s minimum storage retention policy on our cost comparisons with AWS S3. Although some AWS storage classes (i.e. AWS Glacier) have similar minimum storage 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 29 or 89 days of deleted storage (depending on the minimum storage retention policy applicable to your account). 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 128 KB).

 

11. What is the math behind the standard pay-as-you-go $5.99 TB/month price?

The math behind the $5.99 / TB / month price is as follows:

  • GB / mo price: ($5.99) / (1024 GB per TB) = $.00585 GB/mo
  • GB / day price: ($5.99) / (1024 GB per TB) / (30 days per month) = $.00019499 GB/day

If you wish to better understand how GB/TB vs. GiB/TiB related to this topic, please visit this knowledge base article.

 

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 February 2020, 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] = $32.52
  • Wasabi= $5.99/TB/mo (storage)+ $0/GB (egress) = $5.99
  • Wasabi’s total charges of $5.99 are ~82% less than AWS S3’s total charge of $32.52

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. I was a Wasabi customer prior to the implementation of the $5.99 TB/month price on March 5, 2019 – what pricing model applies to my use case?

Wasabi will honor your previous pricing plan for as long as you remain a Wasabi customer.

 

FAQs Specific to Wasabi Reserved Capacity Storage

16. What happens when the RCS reservation term expires?

Your RCS package will automatically renew for subsequent one (1) year terms, unless either party provides the other with notice of its intent not to renew at least ninety (90) days prior to the end of the then-current term.

 

17. What happens if I use more capacity than what I bought as part of the RCS purchase?

When you use more capacity in any given month than what you originally purchased, Wasabi will invoice you monthly at the standard pay-as-you-go price for any overages you may incur. For example, if you purchased a 100 TB RCS package and you use 110 TB in a given month, you will be invoiced for the additional 10 TB (plus 7% for premium support).

If you are planning to add more data to your Wasabi account over the course of the RCS term, we suggest adding a block of storage to your current Wasabi account plan. When you add a block of storage, Wasabi will make the contract end date of the new block of storage coterminous with the current storage plan. Add-on plans can be purchased in increments of 25 TBs and will receive the same RCS discounts as the current plan. Add-on plans will be prorated based on the number of months left on the current plan.

 

18. What happens if I use less capacity than what I bought as part of the RCS purchase?

When you use less capacity in any given month than what you originally purchased, there is no rollover of that unused capacity to the next month. For example, if you purchased a 100 TB RCS package and you only use 80 TB of capacity in a given month, the remaining 20 TB does not carry over to future months.

 

19. Is it possible to terminate a RCS purchase prior to the end of the purchased RCS term?

A Wasabi RCS purchase is non-refundable and non-cancellable.

 

20. I am currently using the Wasabi pay-as-you-go pricing model – can I use the same Wasabi account for RCS purchase?

It is not currently possible for a single Wasabi account to support both the pay-as-you-go and the RCS pricing models. Two separate Wasabi accounts (one for pay-as-you-go; one for RCS) are required.

If you are a direct Wasabi customer and wish to convert from the pay-as-you-go pricing model to the RCS pricing model, you can contact Wasabi to make this change.

 

21. I’m an MSP or VAR; can I offer RCS to my end customers and if so, where can I learn more about the pricing model for channel partners?

Yes, Wasabi RCS can be purchased through authorized Wasabi partners including MSPs and VARs who have signed up to sell the service. If you are already a member of the Wasabi Partner Network, you can find more detailed information by logging into the Wasabi Partner Portal. If you are not yet a partner, contact Wasabi for more info.

 

22. I am a MSP (Managed Service Provider) and I want to share an RCS purchase between multiple end customers; how do I do it?

As the Wasabi account owner, you are free to decide how best to partition your Wasabi RCS purchase amongst your end customers. However, as noted in FAQ#20, it is not possible to use both pay-as-you-go and RCS pricing models with a single Wasabi account. This means that you cannot currently set up a single Wasabi account using pay-as-you-go with some of your Wasabi end customers and RCS with the other Wasabi end customers.

 

 

 

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