Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi: the gotchas decide it

On paper these two are almost the same product. Cheap S3-compatible object storage, roughly a quarter of what AWS charges, no meaningful egress fee, and a pitch aimed squarely at people who just read their S3 bill.

The headline prices are close enough that comparing them is nearly pointless. What actually decides it is a set of policies neither company puts in large type, and those policies mean one of them is clearly right for your workload and the other is quietly wrong.

The headline numbers

Both charge roughly $0.006 to $0.007 per GB per month for storage. On 10 TB that is around $60 to $70 a month with either. Against S3 Standard at roughly $235 for the same data, that is the actual story: both are dramatically cheaper than AWS, and the gap between them is small change.

On egress, both position themselves as free, and both have a shape to that:

• Backblaze B2 gives free egress up to three times your average monthly stored data. Store 10 TB, download up to 30 TB a month at no charge. Beyond that there is a per-gigabyte rate. For the overwhelming majority of workloads this is free in practice.
• Wasabi has no egress fee, with a fair-use policy: if your monthly downloads consistently exceed your stored data, they may ask you to adjust or move on. Store 10 TB, download 10 TB a month, fine. Store 1 TB and serve 40 TB, and you will hear from them.

Neither is a trick. Both are reasonable positions for a business that has to pay for bandwidth. But both mean "free egress" has a shape, and you should know your own ratio before choosing.

The gotcha that actually decides it

Minimum storage duration. This is the one that catches people, and it is why these two providers are not interchangeable.

Wasabi has a 90-day minimum storage duration policy. Store an object and delete it after 3 days, and you are billed as though it stayed for 90.

Backblaze B2 has no minimum retention on its standard product. Delete an object and billing stops.

For a genuine archive, where objects arrive and sit for years, the Wasabi policy is completely irrelevant and you will never notice it.

For anything with churn, it is a large hidden cost:

• Temporary processing artifacts
• Build outputs and CI caches
• Video transcode intermediates
• Anything with a lifecycle rule that deletes after 30 days
• Backup rotation where old backups age out

A worked example. You write 1 TB a month and delete it after 30 days.

On B2: you are billed for roughly what you are storing, so around $6 a month settling to a steady state.

On Wasabi: every object is billed for 90 days regardless. In steady state you are paying for roughly three months of accumulated data at all times, so about three times the storage you actually hold. Your bill is roughly triple what the headline rate suggested.

That single policy is the whole decision for a large fraction of workloads. If your data churns, B2. If your data sits, either, and pick on other grounds.

The rest of the differences

Object Lock and WORM. Both support S3-compatible Object Lock, which matters if you have a retention requirement. Worth verifying the current state on the specific bucket type you plan to use.

Regions. Wasabi has more regions, including several in Europe and Asia. B2 has fewer. If data residency is a requirement, count regions before anything else.

Minimum billing. Wasabi has historically had a minimum monthly charge and a minimum object size of 4 KB for billing. Millions of tiny objects cost more than their bytes suggest. B2 bills what you store.

S3 API completeness. Both implement the S3 API well. B2 also has its own native API, which some older tools use. In practice both work with anything that speaks S3, which is the point of picking either.

Track record and transparency. Backblaze is a public company that publishes quarterly numbers and hard drive failure statistics. Their B2 ARR was $93.0M as of their most recent filing, up 28% year on year. Wasabi is private and discloses less. That is not a quality judgement, but if "will this vendor be here in five years" is a question you have to answer to someone, public filings are easier to point at.

Upload performance. Anecdotally similar. Both are meaningfully slower than S3 for very high request-rate workloads, which is the trade you are making for the price. If you need tens of thousands of requests per second, neither of these is your answer and you should stay on a hyperscaler.

Which one to pick

Choose Backblaze B2 if:

• Your data churns (anything deleted within 90 days)
• You want no minimum retention complexity
• You value a public company's disclosure
• Your download volume is under 3x your stored data
• You want the simplest possible billing model

Choose Wasabi if:

• Your data is a genuine long-term archive with little deletion
• You need a region B2 does not have
• Your download volume regularly exceeds 3x stored data but stays under your stored volume
• You prefer a flat no-egress policy to an allowance

Choose neither if:

• You need very high request rates
• You need deep archival tiers below these prices (Glacier Deep Archive is cheaper still for genuinely cold data, at the cost of retrieval time)
• You need tight integration with the rest of a hyperscaler's services

The honest bit

The price difference between these two is not worth optimising. If you are choosing between B2 and Wasabi to save money, you have already captured almost all of the available saving by leaving your current provider. The remaining difference is noise unless the retention policy bites you, in which case it is not noise, it is triple.

Neither is a drop-in replacement for S3's ecosystem. You are trading integration depth for price. If your application leans on S3 events, Lambda triggers, or Glacier tiers, moving is a rewrite rather than a copy.

Use both, honestly. There is nothing wrong with archive on B2 and a regional bucket on Wasabi. The reason people avoid running two providers is that managing two consoles is annoying, which is a tooling problem rather than an architecture one.

Questions people actually ask

Which is cheaper, B2 or Wasabi? Effectively identical on headline storage rate. B2 is cheaper for anything that gets deleted within 90 days, sometimes dramatically. Wasabi may be cheaper if your egress consistently exceeds 3x your stored data.

Does Wasabi really charge for deleted data? Yes, for the remainder of the 90-day minimum storage duration. It is documented, it is not hidden, and it is the most common surprise on a Wasabi bill.

Is Backblaze egress really free? Free up to three times your average monthly stored volume, which covers most workloads. Beyond that there is a rate.

Can I use both? Yes. Both speak S3, so any S3-compatible tool works with either.

Which is better for backups? B2, usually, because backup rotation deletes old backups and that runs straight into Wasabi's minimum retention.

Which is better for a video archive? Either, if it genuinely sits. Compare on regions and on how much you serve out.

Are these safe to trust with production data? Both offer durability guarantees comparable to the category. Backblaze publishes drive failure data publicly, which is unusually transparent. As with any single provider, the real answer is that a second copy somewhere else is what makes data safe, not a durability figure.

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