Technology

Wasabi

An S3-compatible cloud storage service with a fixed pricing model — no egress fees, no API request fees, approximately $5–7/TB/month with a 90-day minimum storage retention policy.

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Summary

What it is

An S3-compatible cloud storage service with a fixed pricing model — no egress fees, no API request fees, approximately $5–7/TB/month with a 90-day minimum storage retention policy.

Where it fits

Wasabi is the cost-optimized S3-compatible cloud tier for workloads where egress and API costs dominate the bill. It sits alongside Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 as a zero-egress alternative to AWS S3, but with a distinct pricing model — flat rate per TB with no per-request charges, at the cost of a minimum retention floor.

Misconceptions / Traps

Zero egress is not zero cost. The 90-day minimum retention means deleting data before 90 days still incurs charges for the full period. This penalizes short-lived or frequently-replaced datasets.
Wasabi is S3-compatible but not feature-complete with AWS S3. Advanced features like S3 Select, S3 Inventory, and S3 Event Notifications are not available.
No native compute integration. Unlike AWS S3 with Athena/Glue or S3 Tables, Wasabi is pure storage — you must bring your own query engine.

Key Connections

implements S3 API — S3-compatible interface
solves Egress Cost — zero egress and zero API request fees
solves Vendor Lock-In — S3-compatible alternative to hyperscaler storage
scoped_to Object Storage — cloud storage tier

Definition

What it is

A single-tier S3-compatible cloud storage service with zero egress fees and zero API request fees, priced at approximately $5–7/TB/month. Enforces a 90-day minimum storage retention policy. In April 2026, Wasabi extended the platform with **Wasabi AiR**, an intelligent media-storage tier that runs facial recognition, speech-to-text, OCR, and logo detection inline as objects are ingested — folding what was historically a separate AI-tagging service into the storage price.

Why it exists

Hyperscaler egress fees make multi-cloud and hybrid architectures prohibitively expensive. Wasabi's flat pricing model eliminates egress and API call costs, making it viable for backup, compliance archival, and any workload where data is read frequently from outside the provider's network.

Primary use cases

Backup and disaster recovery targets, compliance archival with predictable costs, secondary storage for multi-cloud pipelines, S3-compatible storage for cost-sensitive workloads.

Recent developments

Latest signals

First price rise in company history: $6.99 → $7.99/TB/month effective July 1, 2026 (announced May 11). Pay-as-you-go rises $1 across all regions; Reserved Capacity Storage rebases to the new floor. The fine print that matters for cost modeling: 1 TB minimum billable, 90-day minimum storage duration, and free egress capped at a 1:1 egress-to-storage ratio with throttling beyond. The flat-rate zero-egress model survives — at a higher flat rate. Per Wasabi — May 2026 pricing update (docs) and Wasabi pricing FAQ.
Acquired Seagate's Lyve Cloud business (April 2026) — Seagate took an equity stake. Consolidation on the challenger side of the market: Wasabi absorbs Lyve's footprint and enterprise accounts, Seagate gets equity upside instead of operating a cloud. Mid-2026 scale: 3+ exabytes across 16 regions. Per Wasabi acquires Seagate Lyve Cloud (ChannelWeb) and Wasabi $70M raise coverage (HostingJournalist).
Two new product tiers: Wasabi Fire (NVMe hot class for AI) and Covert Copy (ransomware-hidden backups). Fire is an NVMe-based storage class aimed at ML training, inference, and high-frequency logging while keeping the zero-egress model — Wasabi's answer to the S3 Express One Zone / hot-tier segment. Covert Copy keeps hidden immutable backup copies designed to survive full admin-credential compromise. Per HostingJournalist — Wasabi AI-first expansion.
Wasabi Fire is priced at $19.99/TB/month and debuted with a new San Jose region — Wasabi's 16th worldwide. The performance class was announced November 18, 2025 for early-2026 availability at roughly 2.5–3× the standard hot-storage rate, still with no egress or API fees; the Silicon Valley region is co-located with IBM Cloud, putting the NVMe tier physically close to Bay Area AI compute. Covert Copy, for its part, ships at no additional cost with air-gapped hidden copies and multi-user authentication. Per Wasabi Introduces High-Performance Class and Expands into Silicon Valley (BusinessWire) and Wasabi Technologies expands cloud storage capabilities (TechPartner News).
Disambiguation: the April 30, 2026 "$5.7M Wasabi exploit" was Wasabi Protocol — a DeFi project on Ethereum/Base (keys leaked via an unprotected Spring Boot /heapdump endpoint) — entirely unrelated to Wasabi Technologies. Search engines collide the two names. Per OneSaviesLab post-mortem.
Wasabi raised $70M in new equity at a $1.8B valuation, with Pure Storage among the investors (Jan 13, 2026). The round was led by L2 Point Management with Pure Storage and Fidelity participating, pushing total funding past $600M to fund Wasabi's AI-infrastructure expansion. Per Wasabi raises $70 million for AI cloud storage (Blocks & Files).
Wasabi closed a $250M credit facility (April 21, 2026). The debt facility follows the $70M equity round and the Lyve Cloud acquisition from Seagate, expanding capacity for cloud-storage growth. Per Wasabi Technologies Closes $250M Credit Facility (BusinessWire).
$70M equity round to scale hot cloud storage (January 2026). Per industry news roundups including the Storage and Data Protection News digest for January 16, 2026, Wasabi Technologies closed a $70M equity round to expand its low-cost hot-cloud storage. The capital raise signals continued investor conviction in the flat-rate, zero-egress storage model as a viable third option alongside the hyperscaler tiers and the self-hosted alternatives. Combined with the 2026 launch of Wasabi AiR (the inline-AI-tagging tier at $6.99/TB/mo), Wasabi is one of the few cloud-storage vendors actively differentiating up-stack rather than competing purely on price.
Wasabi's hardware differentiation runs deeper than pricing: a Western Digital partnership brings IsoVibe vibration-isolation and ArcticFlow thermal-zone cooling into its storage platform for higher reliability and more consistent performance — a hardware-engineering angle absent from most flat-rate storage marketing. Per Wasabi × Western Digital case study.
The free-egress allowance has a hard ceiling, not just a ratio. Beyond the well-known 1:1 egress-to-storage ratio, egress is capped at 100TB absolute regardless of how much is stored; Reserved Capacity Storage plans also drop the minimum retention window from 90 days to 30. Per Wasabi Pricing 2026: Plans, Costs & Hidden Fees and Wasabi Pricing Guide 2026.
No native file versioning is a recurring limitation cited against Backblaze B2, which does offer it — worth knowing before picking Wasabi for workloads needing point-in-time object recovery. Per Backblaze vs Wasabi 2026.
EU customers should note Wasabi is a Massachusetts corporation with no EU legal entity — its Frankfurt, London, and Paris regions keep data in-region, but US CLOUD Act jurisdiction still applies regardless of where the bytes sit. Per Wasabi EU Alternative 2026.