Every business backup strategy built on object storage eventually runs into the same three-way decision: Backblaze B2, Wasabi, or AWS S3. All three speak the S3 API, so the same backup software — Veeam, restic, rclone, Duplicati, Arq, Synology Hyper Backup — can point at any of them with a config change. What actually differs is the economics: how storage is priced per class, what egress (download) costs when you need to restore after an incident, minimum retention rules, and the durability guarantees each vendor puts in writing. This piece compares what each vendor’s own pricing pages state today, not list prices from memory.
At a Glance
| Spec | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi | AWS S3 (Standard) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Base storage price | $6.95/TB/month | $7.99/TB/month flat | $23/TB/month (first 50TB) |
| Egress (download) | Free up to 3x avg. storage/month, then $0.01/GB | $0 — no egress fees at all | First 100GB/month free, then $0.09/GB tiering down to $0.05/GB |
| Minimum retention | None | 90 days (Pay As You Go); 30 days (Reserved Capacity) | None for Standard; 30–180 days for IA/Glacier tiers |
| Durability (vendor-stated) | 99.999999999% (11 nines) | 99.999999999% (11 nines) | 99.999999999% (11 nines) |
| S3-API compatible | Yes | Yes | Native |
| Best for | Lowest blended cost for active backup + occasional restores | Predictable flat-fee storage with zero egress anxiety | Deepest feature set, tiering, and ecosystem integration |
Short Verdict
If your backup software just needs cheap, reliable, S3-compatible storage and you occasionally need to pull large restores, Backblaze B2 or Wasabi will beat AWS S3 on total cost by a wide margin — egress is where S3 gets expensive fast during an actual disaster-recovery event. Between the two challengers, Wasabi’s flat $7.99/TB with zero egress fees is the simplest to budget for predictable, always-on backup jobs; Backblaze B2’s $6.95/TB base rate plus free egress up to 3x your stored volume is cheaper for shops that restore more selectively and want pay-as-you-go flexibility without a 90-day minimum retention clock. AWS S3 still wins when you need its storage-class tiering (Glacier Deep Archive at under $1/TB/month for cold archives), tight integration with other AWS services, or your backup tool is specifically optimized for S3 lifecycle policies.
What Each Platform Is
Backblaze B2 is S3-compatible object storage built by Backblaze, the same company behind the well-known consumer backup product, but B2 is a separate business-grade storage service with its own API, console, and billing. It’s commonly paired with backup tools like Veeam (as an immutable backup target), restic, rclone, and Synology/QNAP NAS backup integrations, and is also usable as a direct drop-in replacement for S3 buckets in scripts and apps.
Wasabi is a storage-only cloud vendor — it has no compute, no CDN, no AI services, just S3-compatible buckets. That focus is also its pricing pitch: one flat per-TB rate with no egress or API request fees of any kind, which Wasabi states plainly on its own pricing page. It’s widely used behind backup software (Veeam is an official “Alliance Partner” integration) and by media/surveillance workloads that move large files in and out frequently.
AWS S3 is the original and still-dominant object storage service, with the deepest storage-class ladder of the three: Standard, Standard-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Glacier Deep Archive, each with a different storage price, retrieval fee, and minimum retention period. Most major backup software (Veeam, Commvault, Rubrik, Druva) has native, first-class S3 integration, and S3 is the default target for countless CI/CD and application backup scripts already running in AWS.
Pricing Breakdown
| Storage class / item | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi | AWS S3 (us-east-1) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard/hot storage | $6.95/TB/mo (~$0.00695/GB); first 10GB free | $7.99/TB/mo flat, billed per GB-day | $23/TB/mo (first 50TB), $22/TB (next 450TB), $21/TB (>500TB) |
| Cool/infrequent-access tier | Not offered as a separate class | Not offered as a separate class | Standard-IA: $12.50/TB/mo, plus per-GB retrieval fee; 30-day minimum |
| Cold archive tier | B2 Overdrive (enterprise, multi-PB commitment): $15/TB/mo, includes unlimited egress | Not offered | Glacier Instant Retrieval $4/TB/mo (90-day min); Glacier Flexible Retrieval $3.60/TB/mo (90-day min); Glacier Deep Archive $0.99/TB/mo (180-day min) |
| Egress / download | Free up to 3x average monthly storage, then $0.01/GB; free via Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net, and other partner CDNs | $0 always, per Wasabi’s own pricing page | First 100GB/mo free (account-wide), then $0.09/GB up to 10TB, $0.085/GB next 40TB, $0.07/GB next 100TB, $0.05/GB beyond 150TB |
| API / request fees | Classes A–C free (pay-as-you-go); Class D (downloads via API) $0.004 per 10,000 calls after 2,500 free/day | $0 — no API request fees | GET: $0.0004 per 1,000 requests (Standard); PUT/other request classes priced separately on AWS’s site |
The number that matters most for business continuity planning isn’t the storage rate — it’s what a real restore costs. Pulling back 10TB after an incident is free on Wasabi, costs roughly $70–$100 on Backblaze B2 (depending on how much you’d already downloaded that month against the 3x-free allowance), and costs roughly $900 on AWS S3 Standard egress pricing (after the first 100GB). That gap is the whole argument for using B2 or Wasabi as a secondary/DR backup target even for organizations that otherwise live on AWS.
Pros and Cons
- Backblaze B2 — Pros: lowest base storage rate of the three; generous free-egress allowance for routine restore testing; no minimum retention period; native Veeam immutability support. Cons: no intermediate/cold storage tier for B2 proper (Overdrive requires a multi-petabyte commitment); smaller global footprint than AWS.
- Wasabi — Pros: genuinely zero egress and API fees, which makes cost modeling trivial; flat rate regardless of region; Reserved Capacity Storage can push the effective rate lower on multi-year commitments. Cons: 90-day minimum retention on Pay As You Go means early deletions still get billed for the full 90 days; no storage-class tiering for colder, cheaper archival.
- AWS S3 — Pros: unmatched storage-class ladder for tiering hot backups down to sub-$1/TB cold archives; deepest ecosystem and native support in nearly every enterprise backup tool; strongest compliance/certification paper trail. Cons: by far the most expensive egress of the three, which punishes exactly the scenario — a real restore — that backup exists for; Glacier tiers carry retrieval fees and minimum-duration penalties on top of storage cost.
Who It’s a Good Fit For
Choose Backblaze B2 if you want the lowest everyday cost with flexibility to delete or shrink backups at will, and you expect to test-restore periodically without worrying about a big surprise bill. Choose Wasabi if budget predictability matters more than flexibility — a flat per-TB number with zero egress fees is easy to put in a budget line and defend to finance, especially for video/surveillance or large media backup sets that get pulled back often. Choose AWS S3 if you’re already deep in the AWS ecosystem, need Glacier-tier pricing for long-term cold archives well under $1/TB/month, or your backup software’s lifecycle-policy automation is built specifically around S3’s storage classes.
Who Should Look Elsewhere
Organizations that need frequent, unpredictable large-scale restores (e.g., regular DR drills across many terabytes) should think twice before standardizing on AWS S3 Standard as the primary backup target, given its egress pricing. Organizations that need object storage with heavy compute or CDN integration baked into the same vendor are better served by AWS or another full-stack cloud provider rather than Wasabi, which deliberately offers storage only.
Bottom Line
For most businesses using dedicated backup software against S3-compatible object storage, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi are the more defensible defaults purely on egress economics — the cost of actually restoring data, which is the entire point of a backup. AWS S3 remains the right call when you need its storage-class depth or you’re backing up data that already lives in AWS and rarely needs to leave it. Run the numbers against your own expected restore frequency and volume before committing, since that one variable swings the total cost comparison more than the base storage rate does.
FAQ
Can I use Veeam, restic, or rclone with all three? Yes. All three expose an S3-compatible API, and Veeam, restic, rclone, Duplicati, and most other backup tools support any S3-compatible endpoint by changing the endpoint URL and credentials.
Which one is cheapest for pure storage with no restores? Backblaze B2 at $6.95/TB/month is the lowest base rate of the three, slightly under Wasabi’s $7.99/TB/month flat rate, and far under AWS S3 Standard’s $23/TB/month (though AWS’s Glacier Deep Archive at $0.99/TB/month is cheaper than either for true cold, rarely-touched data).
Does Wasabi really have zero egress fees with no catch? Wasabi’s own pricing page states no fees for egress or API requests. The real-world caveat isn’t egress — it’s the 90-day minimum storage duration on the Pay As You Go plan, which bills for 90 days even if you delete data sooner.
What does “11 nines” durability actually mean? 99.999999999% annual durability means, statistically, that if you stored 10 million objects for 10,000,000 years, you’d expect to lose roughly one object. All three vendors state this same figure for their standard storage class; it describes the odds of losing data to the storage system itself, not protection against accidental deletion or ransomware, which is why immutability/versioning settings in your backup software still matter.
Sources
- Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage Pricing — backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing
- Backblaze — Cloud Storage Durability vs. Availability (blog)
- Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage Pricing — wasabi.com/pricing and wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage
- Wasabi Knowledge Base — “How durable is Wasabi?”
- AWS S3 Pricing — aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing
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