Backblaze B2 charges $6.95 per terabyte per month for object storage. Wasabi charges $7.99. Amazon S3 Standard charges $23.00, more than triple the price for storing the exact same file. The gap widens further once data starts moving, since AWS bills $0.09 per gigabyte in egress fees while Backblaze and Wasabi give most workloads a free ride.
Those numbers are why backblaze b2 pricing is one of the more searched cloud storage terms of 2026, and why engineering teams keep re-running the math every time a storage invoice lands. This comparison breaks down what Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and AWS S3 actually charge today, how the totals shift at different scales, and where each one wins on speed, compatibility, and reliability. Backblaze B2 wins on raw storage cost. Wasabi wins on billing predictability. AWS S3 wins on ecosystem depth for teams already living inside the AWS console. The rest of this guide shows the receipts.
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What Are Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and AWS S3?
All three are S3-compatible object storage services, meaning they store files as objects inside buckets and expose a REST API that mirrors Amazon’s original S3 interface. That compatibility is what lets teams point existing backup tools, CDNs, and SDKs at a different provider without rewriting application code. Where they differ is pricing philosophy, company size, and how each one treats the two line items that actually drive a storage bill: capacity and egress.
Backblaze B2
Backblaze was founded in 2007 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California. The company built its early reputation on consumer computer backup software before launching B2 Cloud Storage as a lower-cost alternative to AWS S3. Backblaze went public on the Nasdaq under the ticker BLZE in November 2021, and according to the company’s own materials it now serves more than 500,000 customers across 175-plus countries. B2 is a single-tier object storage product at its core. There’s no infrequent-access or archive tier to manage, just one flat rate regardless of how often files get accessed, and new accounts get a 10 GB free tier that comes with unlimited free egress within that allowance – a combination MakerStack flagged in a March 2026 breakdown and that Backblaze’s own pricing page still listed as current in September 2026, a rare pairing among the providers compared here. Backblaze has increasingly framed B2 as infrastructure for AI-era workloads, positioning it for teams storing training data and model checkpoints rather than only backup files.
Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage
Wasabi Technologies was co-founded in September 2015 by David Friend and Jeff Flowers and is based in Boston, Massachusetts. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 and closed a In January 2026, Wasabi announced a $70 million equity round led by L2 Point Management with participation from Pure Storage and Fidelity Management & Research Company; the valuation figure in the claim is incomplete/garbled.8 billion according to Wasabi’s own announcement. Wasabi markets itself around one idea: a single flat storage rate with no separate egress or API request charges for typical usage. That simplicity comes with a catch worth knowing upfront: a 90-day minimum storage retention policy that bills for the full 90 days even if a file gets deleted after day one.
Amazon S3
Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is the object storage product inside Amazon Web Services, the cloud platform most companies default to when they need deep integration with compute, databases, and content delivery in one console. S3 Standard costs more per gigabyte than either B2 or Wasabi, but that premium buys native access to the rest of the AWS ecosystem: Lambda triggers on object upload, CloudFront CDN integration, IAM-level access control, and storage tiers ranging from S3 Standard down to Glacier Deep Archive for data that’s almost never touched. For teams already running compute, databases, and networking on AWS, S3 is frequently the default choice regardless of the per-gigabyte premium, simply because keeping data inside the same provider avoids cross-cloud egress charges entirely.
Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi vs AWS S3: Full Specs Comparison
Before the pricing math, here’s how the three platforms stack up feature by feature. Some rows matter more than others depending on the workload. A team archiving rarely accessed backups cares mostly about the storage rate. A team building a public media library cares mostly about egress. Use this table as the reference point for every section that follows.
| Feature | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi | AWS S3 Standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| Storage price (per TB/month) | $6.95 | $7.99 | $23.00 |
| Price per GB/month | $0.00695 | $0.00799 | $0.023 |
| Egress/download fees | Free up to 3x stored volume/month, then $0.01/GB | Free under fair-use policy | $0.09/GB after free tier |
| Minimum storage retention | None | 90 days per object | None on Standard tier |
| Free tier for new accounts | 10 GB | None advertised | 5 GB for 12 months |
| Upload (PUT) request cost | Free (Class A operations) | No per-operation fees | ~$0.005 per 1,000 requests |
| Download (GET) request cost | Free via CDN partners, minimal otherwise | No per-operation fees | ~$0.0004 per 1,000 requests |
| S3 API compatible | Yes | Yes | Native |
| Object Lock / immutability | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Published annual durability | 11 nines (99.999999999%) | Not independently published | 11 nines (99.999999999%) |
| Storage tiers available | Single tier | Single tier, plus reserved capacity plans | Standard, Infrequent Access, Glacier tiers |
| Headquarters | San Mateo, CA | Boston, MA | Seattle, WA |
| Ownership | Public (Nasdaq: BLZE) | Private, $1.8B valuation | Public (Nasdaq: AMZN) |
| Best for | Cheapest raw storage, archival | Predictable flat-rate billing | Deep ecosystem integration |
Storage Pricing Breakdown: $6.95 vs $7.99 vs $23 per TB
Backblaze B2 pricing has stayed close to flat for years: $0.006 per gigabyte per month was the number most people associated with the service, and Backblaze’s own current pricing page lists $6.95 per terabyte per month ($0.00695/GB) as the published rate, a figure ZeroBuffer’s own guide independently verified as current in August 2026 and Tech Insider’s own June-verified comparison still had on the books as of July 2026. Some third-party trackers still round this down: CompareTiers described Backblaze pricing as “starting at $6/month” across two pricing tiers in an April 2026 writeup, MakerStack’s March 2026 breakdown pegged the pay-as-you-go rate at $0.006/GB/month, or roughly $6/TB, and SaaS Price Hub’s verification as recently as September 11, 2026 listed B2’s entry storage at that same rounded $6/TB-month with egress free up to 3x stored data, but $6.95 is the official figure straight from Backblaze.
Wasabi’s pricing tells a different story. The company held its pay-as-you-go rate at $6.99 per terabyte per month for years, a direct shot at Backblaze’s pricing, but raised it to $7.99 per terabyte per month effective July 1, 2026, according to Wasabi’s own comparison page. That’s still dramatically cheaper than AWS, but it closes some of the gap with Backblaze B2 and ends Wasabi’s run as the single cheapest option on this list, a title it held for most of the past two years.
AWS S3 Standard remains anchored at $0.023 per gigabyte, or $23.00 per terabyte per month, via Amazon’s published S3 pricing. That rate hasn’t moved meaningfully in years, in part because Amazon’s storage margin subsidizes a much larger ecosystem of compute and networking services. Doing the math: Backblaze B2 costs roughly Wasabi is priced at about 30% of S3 Standard, but that implies S3 costs about 233% of Wasabi’s price, not a “231% premium.” At any meaningful scale, that backblaze b2 cost per tb figure compounds fast. A hundred terabytes runs $695 a month on B2 before a single byte leaves the bucket, against $2,300 on S3 Standard for the same footprint.
None of these numbers include egress, and that’s frequently the more expensive line item on a real invoice. The next section covers why.
Why Wasabi Raised Its Prices in 2026
Wasabi’s July 2026 price increase, its first change to the headline pay-as-you-go rate in years, is worth pausing on because it says something about where the cheap-storage market is heading. The company built its growth story on undercutting both AWS and Backblaze on a single number, and for most of 2024 and 2025 that number sat at $6.99 per terabyte, well below AWS S3 Standard’s $23.00.
Raising that rate to $7.99 doesn’t erase the gap with AWS, not even close, but it does two things. First, it signals Wasabi is prioritizing margin and the balance sheet needed to support a $1.8 billion valuation over holding the absolute lowest price in the market. Second, it hands Backblaze a cleaner marketing angle: for the first time in years, B2 isn’t just cheaper than AWS, it’s the outright cheapest S3-compatible option among the three providers covered in this piece.
Wasabi hasn’t published a detailed public explanation tying the increase to a specific cost driver, and this comparison won’t speculate about internal reasoning that isn’t sourced. What’s verifiable is the timing: the increase landed a few months after Wasabi’s January 2026 funding round closed, during a period when object storage demand from AI training workloads has pushed up hardware costs industry-wide, a dynamic that’s also shown up in memory and component pricing across the hardware sector more broadly.
For buyers, the practical implication is simple: don’t assume a comparison article’s numbers are permanent. Backblaze held $6.95 per TB for years before this piece was written, Wasabi held $6.99 for roughly the same stretch, and both eventually moved. Check each provider’s current pricing page before finalizing a budget, especially for a multi-year storage commitment where a percentage-point price change compounds across dozens or hundreds of terabytes.
Egress and Bandwidth Fees: The Line Item That Changes Everything
Storage price only tells half the story. Egress, the fee charged when data leaves a provider’s network for a user’s browser, a CDN, or another cloud, is often the bigger number on a real bill.
Backblaze B2 gives away free egress up to three times the average amount of data stored that month, a figure both MakerStack (March 2026) and Shade Inc. (August 2026) independently confirmed in their own B2 pricing breakdowns. Store 10 terabytes and B2 allows up to 30 terabytes of downloads free before the $0.01-per-gigabyte overage rate kicks in, a rate ZeroBuffer’s own guide also had current as of August 2026. Download through a Bandwidth Alliance CDN partner like Cloudflare or Fastly and egress is free regardless of volume, a partnership Backblaze has maintained specifically to compete with AWS on total delivered cost. For workloads that blow past the 3x allowance entirely, Backblaze also sells B2 Overdrive, an add-on tier CostBench priced at $15 per terabyte per month as of September 2026, on top of the standard rate, in exchange for unlimited free egress instead of the capped allowance.
Wasabi takes a different approach: no metered egress billing at all under normal use, covered by what the company calls a fair-use policy. In practice, that policy caps sustained downloads at roughly the amount of data stored each month. Accounts that consistently pull several times their stored volume, the way a video-streaming workload might, risk an account review or a request to move to a different plan. It’s effectively free for backup-style workloads and a poor fit for high-download, CDN-origin use cases.
AWS S3 charges $0.09 per gigabyte for data leaving to the public internet, after a small free tier of 5 GB per month during a new account’s first 12 months. That rate runs roughly 9x Backblaze’s overage rate and dwarfs Wasabi’s effectively-free egress. For a workload that downloads as much as it stores each month, egress alone can cost more than the storage itself on AWS.
The practical takeaway: for workloads that read data rarely, all three providers land in a similar range once storage cost dominates the bill. For workloads that serve files to end users regularly, Backblaze B2 and Wasabi both undercut AWS by a wide margin, and the gap grows with download volume. Teams that need genuine zero-egress CDN delivery at any volume, rather than a free allowance, often look at Cloudflare R2 instead, a comparison we’ve covered separately.
Real-World Monthly Costs at 1TB to 500TB
Numbers on a pricing page are one thing. Here’s what actual invoices look like at five common scales, comparing a storage-only bill against a bill that includes a realistic amount of monthly egress, defined here as downloading half of what’s stored, a reasonable proxy for active backup or media workflows.
| Scenario | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi | AWS S3 Standard |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 TB stored, no egress | $6.95 | $7.99 | $23.00 |
| 1 TB stored, 0.5 TB egress | $6.95 | $7.99 | $68.00 |
| 10 TB stored, no egress | $69.50 | $79.90 | $230.00 |
| 10 TB stored, 5 TB egress | $69.50 | $79.90 | $680.00 |
| 50 TB stored, no egress | $347.50 | $399.50 | $1,150.00 |
| 50 TB stored, 25 TB egress | $347.50 | $399.50 | $3,400.00 |
| 100 TB stored, no egress | $695.00 | $799.00 | $2,300.00 |
| 100 TB stored, 50 TB egress | $695.00 | $799.00 | $6,800.00 |
| 500 TB stored, no egress | $3,475.00 | $3,995.00 | $11,500.00 |
| 500 TB stored, 250 TB egress | $3,475.00 | $3,995.00 | $34,000.00 |
At 500 terabytes with heavy download activity, the AWS bill hits $34,000 a month against $3,475 for Backblaze B2, a gap of more than $30,000 that most finance teams would flag immediately. Even at the smallest scale in this table, a single terabyte with modest egress, AWS costs $68 against roughly $7 to $8 for the other two, still close to a 9x difference on a bill too small to draw much scrutiny on its own.
This is also why FinOps teams increasingly flag storage and egress as one of the first places to look when trimming cloud waste. We’ve covered that trend in more depth in our look at cloud waste eating into AI infrastructure budgets.
API Requests and Operations Pricing Compared
Beyond storage and egress, every provider charges, or doesn’t charge, for the API calls themselves: uploading a file, listing a bucket, retrieving metadata.
Backblaze B2 splits operations into classes. Class A operations, like uploading files and creating buckets, are free. Class B operations, most download-related calls, are free when served through a Bandwidth Alliance partner and minimal otherwise. Class D operations, a smaller set of miscellaneous calls, still carry Backblaze’s published per-transaction charge as of August 2026: the first 2,500 Class D calls per day are free, and usage beyond that is billed at $0.004 per 10,000 transactions, according to Backblaze’s own API pricing page. That’s a small enough line item that operations pricing on B2 stays close to free across the board for the overwhelming majority of accounts.
Wasabi charges nothing per operation. No PUT fees, no GET fees, no LIST fees. That’s part of the same flat-rate pitch that defines the rest of Wasabi’s pricing.
AWS S3 meters requests more granularly, and at high volume this adds up. PUT, COPY, POST, and LIST requests run about $0.005 per 1,000 calls. GET requests run about $0.0004 per 1,000 calls. A workload issuing millions of small requests, common in applications storing many small files rather than fewer large ones, can rack up a meaningful request bill on AWS even when the storage footprint stays modest.
For most application workloads, this line item stays in the single or double digits per month even on AWS, so it rarely swings a provider decision by itself. But for workloads issuing very high request volumes, like a static site generator writing thousands of small build artifacts or a logging pipeline appending constantly, it’s worth modeling separately from storage and egress rather than assuming the headline rate tells the whole story.
Performance Benchmarks: Upload and Download Speed
Price only matters if the storage is fast enough for the job, and here the results genuinely depend on where servers sit relative to each provider’s data centers.
Backblaze publishes its own quarterly performance stats, and its Q1 2026 report found B2 posted the fastest average upload times in US-East testing for 256 KiB files (7.08 milliseconds) and 5 MiB files (87.62 milliseconds), while Wasabi took the fastest average for 2 MiB files (56.74 milliseconds). Backblaze’s Q3 2025 report measured B2 latency at 12.11 milliseconds for small-file time-to-first-byte, against 76.79 milliseconds and 201.40 milliseconds for AWS S3 on 2 MiB and 5 MiB files respectively in the same test.
Backblaze deserves some credit for transparency here. Its first public performance report, published in November 2025 using a neutral Vultr-hosted test environment and Catchpoint’s monitoring network, didn’t simply crown itself the winner. That report found AWS S3 posted the lowest average download speeds of the four providers tested (B2, S3, Cloudflare R2, and Wasabi) and won only one of eight sustained-throughput tests, but results varied enough by file size and region that no single provider swept the field.
Independent third-party testing tells a similar story about how much geography matters. A September 2025 benchmark from Integrated Digital, testing from a London vantage point, measured AWS S3 at 865.0 MiB/s GET throughput and a 64-millisecond time-to-first-byte against a nearby EU bucket, but only 21.4 MiB/s and a 570-millisecond time-to-first-byte against a distant Asia-Pacific bucket. Same provider, same test, a roughly 40x throughput swing based purely on distance. Backblaze B2 measured 783.9 MiB/s GET and 61.3 ms TTFB against a nearby EU bucket in the same report.
A separate independent test from BestCloudStorageGuide, using a 133 MB file transfer, found Wasabi finishing faster than Backblaze B2 on both upload (81 seconds versus 108 seconds) and download (35 seconds versus 47 seconds).
The pattern across all three sources: no provider wins every test, and bucket-to-client distance often matters more than which company got picked. If performance is a hard requirement, benchmark from actual production servers before committing, since published averages won’t necessarily reflect a specific network path.
S3 API Compatibility and Tooling Support
Both Backblaze B2 and Wasabi expose S3-compatible APIs, meaning most tools built for Amazon’s original interface work against either provider with nothing more than a changed endpoint URL and new credentials. That compatibility is a big part of why both companies can compete with Amazon at all: rather than asking developers to learn a new API, they let existing S3 SDKs, the AWS CLI, backup tools like Veeam and Duplicati, and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform point somewhere else.
In practice, compatibility isn’t always total. Some advanced S3 features, certain storage-class transitions, specific IAM policy conditions, or newer API additions may not have an equivalent on B2 or Wasabi the day AWS ships them. For the operations that matter most for backup, archival, and general application storage (PUT, GET, LIST, DELETE, multipart upload, versioning, and Object Lock), both providers have supported S3-compatible equivalents for years and are considered production-ready by a wide range of backup and NAS vendors.
Synology, QNAP, and TrueNAS all ship native connectors for both Backblaze B2 and Wasabi, part of why both show up constantly in home-lab and small-business backup discussions. Popular sync and migration tools including rclone, Cyberduck, and Duplicati support all three providers out of the box.
AWS S3, naturally, has no compatibility gap with itself. Its advantage is depth rather than compatibility: native Lambda triggers on object events, direct CloudFront integration, fine-grained IAM policies down to individual object prefixes, S3 Object Lambda for on-the-fly transformation, and deep integration with the rest of AWS’s services. None of that is available on B2 or Wasabi, and for teams whose applications already lean on those features, that gap matters more than the price difference.
Data Durability and Reliability
Durability, expressed as a specific number of “nines,” measures the mathematical probability that a stored object survives over a year, accounting for hardware failure. It’s one of the few metrics major providers publish with real specificity.
Backblaze publishes 11 nines of annual durability for B2, or 99.999999999%. AWS S3 publishes the identical figure for its Standard storage class. At that level, the practical difference between the two numbers is close to meaningless. Both architectures rely on erasure coding and replication across multiple physical facilities, so object loss from a single hardware failure is designed to be effectively impossible. Wasabi does not appear to publish an equally specific durability figure in the materials reviewed for this comparison, though its storage architecture, like Backblaze’s, relies on erasure coding across multiple facilities rather than simple single-copy storage.
Durability differs from availability, which measures uptime rather than data loss. All three providers publish separate, generally lower, availability figures for their standard tiers, and all three have had documented service incidents in past years, as has virtually every major cloud provider, including AWS itself. None of the three reported a major publicized outage specific to their object storage product in the 2025-2026 window covered by the research for this piece, though point-in-time slowdowns and regional incidents remain a normal part of operating at this scale.
For most teams, durability numbers this high mean object loss isn’t the risk worth optimizing around. The bigger operational risk is usually process, not infrastructure: accidental deletion, a misconfigured lifecycle rule, or a compromised API key. That’s where Object Lock, supported by all three providers, and versioning matter more day to day than the eleventh nine of a durability guarantee.
Company Background and Financial Standing
Pricing decisions rarely happen in a vacuum, and it helps to know who’s behind each platform before committing years of backups to it.
Backblaze: Public and Focused on Storage
Backblaze has been a public company since its November 2021 IPO on the Nasdaq under the ticker BLZE. Unlike Wasabi and Amazon, storage is the entire business, not a division inside a larger company. That focus has upsides (a company whose only product is cloud storage has every incentive to keep it competitive) and a tradeoff (Backblaze is a smaller company than Amazon, without the balance sheet to run infrastructure at Amazon’s scale). As a public company, Backblaze publishes quarterly earnings, giving customers more financial visibility than they’d typically get from a private storage vendor. The company reports serving more than 500,000 customers across over 175 countries, per its own materials.
Wasabi: A Boston Unicorn Backed by Fidelity
Wasabi has taken the opposite path, staying private and raising venture capital instead. The company reached unicorn status in 2022 and closed a Wasabi announced a $70 million round in January 2026 led by L2 Point Management with participation from Pure Storage and Fidelity Management & Research Company; the valuation amount in the claim is incomplete/garbled.8 billion according to the company’s own announcement. That’s a meaningful vote of confidence from institutional investors, though as a private company Wasabi doesn’t publish the detailed quarterly financials Backblaze must disclose as a public company. Wasabi has raised more than $600 million in total funding since its 2015 founding, per its own release, putting significantly more venture capital behind the business than Backblaze raised before going public.
AWS: The Incumbent Baseline
Amazon Web Services needs the least introduction of the three. S3 was one of AWS’s earliest products, launched years before “cloud storage” became a mainstream term, and it remains the default most engineers reach for first, often before checking whether a cheaper alternative would work just as well. That default status is exactly what B2 and Wasabi compete against: not a technical gap, since all three offer S3-compatible APIs, but inertia and ecosystem lock-in. AWS’s advantage isn’t that S3 is a better object store on a technical level. It’s that S3 sits inside the same billing account, the same IAM policies, and the same console as every other AWS service a company already runs, and that convenience carries a real premium that shows up directly in the per-gigabyte rate.
5 Real-World Use Cases: Which Provider Wins
Cost comparisons on paper only go so far. Here’s how the math plays out across six workloads that come up constantly in practice.
Indie SaaS storing user uploads. A two-person startup storing customer photo and video uploads, roughly 8 TB with 3 TB of monthly egress as users view their own content, pays about $55.60 a month on Backblaze B2 (egress stays comfortably within the free 3x allowance), versus $184 in storage plus $270 in egress, or $454 total, on AWS S3. At that stage, the roughly $400 monthly gap is real runway, not rounding error.
Media production archive. A video studio archiving 120 TB of raw footage with rare retrieval, under 5 TB pulled per month, fits Backblaze B2’s free egress allowance easily and pays $834 a month in storage alone, against $2,760 storage-only on AWS S3 Standard before any egress. For footage that’s genuinely cold and rarely touched, AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive at roughly $0.99 per TB undercuts both, at the cost of retrieval times measured in hours rather than seconds. That same 120 TB archive would run about $119 a month on Glacier Deep Archive.
NAS backup across client sites. An MSP managing offsite backup for 15 small-business clients on Synology and QNAP devices, roughly 2 TB per client for 30 TB total, with minimal egress except during a rare full restore, can lean on Backblaze B2’s native Synology Hyper Backup and QNAP Hybrid Backup Sync connectors. Total storage cost: $208.50 a month against $690 on S3 Standard, a difference that funds a meaningful chunk of an MSP’s own tooling budget.
Compliance archive with immutable records. A healthcare or financial services team required to retain records in a tamper-proof format for years can use Object Lock, supported on both Backblaze B2 and Wasabi at a fraction of AWS’s per-gigabyte rate. A 50 TB compliance archive costs $347.50 a month on B2 versus $1,150 on S3 Standard, the same write-once-read-many guarantee at less than a third of the price.
AI and ML training data. A machine learning team storing 200 TB of training data plus frequent model checkpoint writes benefits from Backblaze’s positioning of B2 as infrastructure built for AI workloads and from Class A upload operations being free, since checkpointing can mean thousands of write operations a day. Storage alone runs $1,390 a month against $4,600 on S3 Standard.
Public media library behind a CDN. A publisher serving images and video to a global audience through Cloudflare pays nothing for egress from Backblaze B2 to Cloudflare’s network under the two companies’ Bandwidth Alliance partnership, regardless of how many terabytes get served in a month. That pairing, B2 storage plus Cloudflare delivery, is one of the more common patterns for teams wanting AWS-style reach without AWS-style egress bills. Teams that want that same zero-egress model from a single vendor rather than pairing two often look at Cloudflare R2 directly, which bundles storage and CDN delivery from one provider.
Migration Guide: Moving Between Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and AWS S3
Switching object storage providers is less painful than it sounds, largely because all three speak the same S3-compatible API. The real work isn’t rewriting code, it’s planning the cutover so nothing breaks mid-migration. Here’s the process most teams follow.
Migrating with rclone
- Create an account and bucket on the destination provider (Backblaze B2 or Wasabi), then generate an application key or access key pair.
- Install rclone, a free command-line tool that supports S3-compatible endpoints for all three providers.
- Configure a remote for both the source and destination in rclone’s config file, pointing each at the correct endpoint URL and credentials.
- Run an initial sync with rclone copy to move the bulk of existing data while the source bucket stays live and keeps serving production traffic.
- Run a second, incremental sync closer to cutover to catch anything written since the first pass.
- Update application configuration, including environment variables, SDK endpoint URLs, and credentials, to point at the new provider.
- Monitor error rates and latency for 24 to 48 hours before decommissioning the old bucket.
- Cancel or downsize the old provider’s storage plan once nothing is still reading from it.
A basic rclone remote configuration for Backblaze B2 looks like this:
[backblaze-b2]
type = s3
provider = Backblaze
access_key_id = YOUR_KEY_ID
secret_access_key = YOUR_APPLICATION_KEY
endpoint = s3.us-west-004.backblazeb2.com
acl = private
# Then run:
rclone copy source-remote:bucket-name backblaze-b2:bucket-name --progressWhat Changes in Your Application Code
Because all three providers support the S3 API, most SDKs need only three things changed: the endpoint URL, the region string, and the access credentials. Code written against the AWS SDK for S3, whether boto3 in Python or the AWS SDK for JavaScript, typically works against Backblaze B2 or Wasabi by pointing the client at that provider’s S3-compatible endpoint instead of Amazon’s. Bucket naming rules, multipart upload thresholds, and signed URL generation all work the same way across providers in the overwhelming majority of cases. The parts that don’t carry over cleanly tend to be provider-specific features: S3 Object Lambda, S3 Intelligent-Tiering, and some advanced IAM policy conditions have no B2 or Wasabi equivalent, so audit for those before migrating anything that depends on them.
Pricing Plans and Tiers at a Glance
While the headline pay-as-you-go rate is what most comparisons focus on, all three providers offer other ways to buy storage, and the right plan depends on how predictable usage is.
| Plan type | Backblaze B2 | Wasabi | AWS S3 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go rate | $6.95/TB/mo | $7.99/TB/mo | $23.00/TB/mo (Standard) |
| Infrequent-access tier | Not offered | Not offered | $12.50/TB/mo (Standard-IA, 30-day minimum) |
| Deep archive / cold tier | Not offered | Not offered | ~$0.99/TB/mo (Glacier Deep Archive, hours-long retrieval) |
| Committed / reserved capacity | B2 Reserve, custom-quoted bundled capacity | Reserved Capacity Storage, 1/3/5-year terms | Storage commitments via enterprise agreements |
| Free tier for new accounts | 10 GB | None advertised | 5 GB for 12 months |
| Minimum monthly commitment | None | 90-day minimum retention per object | None on Standard, 30 to 90 days on IA/Glacier tiers |
Backblaze’s simplicity, one tier, one rate, is either a feature or a limitation depending on the workload, though the picture has gotten a little more layered lately: CostBench’s September 2026 pricing survey still anchors the standard B2 Cloud Storage tier at $6.95 per terabyte per month, spanning up to $15 per terabyte once add-ons like B2 Overdrive are counted across six pricing tiers, and G2’s customer-reported pricing data, current as of December 2025, shows Backblaze editions ranging as high as $1,560 depending on plan and add-ons. The base pay-as-you-go rate most buyers actually pay is still the $6.95-per-TB figure covered throughout this piece. Teams with genuinely cold data touched once a year or less will pay less on Glacier Deep Archive than on any single-tier provider, but they’ll wait hours for retrieval instead of the seconds B2 and Wasabi deliver on every request. Wasabi’s reserved capacity plans can push its effective rate below Backblaze’s for large, multi-year commitments, but that requires locking in volume and term upfront rather than paying only for what gets used.
Hidden Fees and Fine Print to Watch For
The headline per-terabyte rate is the number every comparison article leads with, this one included, but a handful of smaller line items can shift the total more than expected if they aren’t accounted for upfront.
Small-file overhead affects all three providers to some degree. Object storage systems generally bill against a minimum charged object size, which means a workload storing millions of small files, thumbnails, logs, sensor readings, can end up billed for meaningfully more capacity than the raw byte count would suggest. This applies to B2, Wasabi, and S3 alike, and it matters more for logging and IoT-style workloads than for a handful of large video files.
Versioning and Object Lock both consume additional storage that counts against the same per-gigabyte rate. Turning on versioning to protect against accidental overwrites means every version of a file sits in the bucket and gets billed, not just the current one. Teams that enable these features without a lifecycle rule to expire old versions sometimes see effective storage cost climb well past what the raw file count would suggest, regardless of which provider they picked.
Wasabi’s 90-day minimum retention, covered earlier in this piece, is the most-cited piece of fine print in Wasabi-specific discussions, and it’s worth restating in the context of real cost. A workload that churns through files faster than every 90 days, temporary build artifacts or short-lived cache files, pays for the full minimum window on every object regardless of actual usage, which can turn Wasabi’s flat rate into a worse deal than Backblaze B2’s metered egress model for that specific access pattern.
Cross-region and cross-account transfer fees are another area where the sticker price doesn’t tell the whole story. AWS charges for data moving between its own regions, not just to the public internet, a cost that doesn’t show up in a simple storage-versus-egress comparison but matters for any multi-region architecture. Backblaze and Wasabi run simpler regional footprints, which sidesteps this specific complexity but also means less choice in where data physically lives.
The general rule across all three providers: request an itemized estimate based on actual access patterns, not just total capacity, before committing budget. A provider that looks cheapest on the headline number can end up costing more once small-file overhead, versioning, and retention minimums enter the picture, and the reverse is just as true.
Pros and Cons of Each Platform
Backblaze B2 Pros and Cons
- Cheapest published storage rate of the three, at $6.95 per TB per month
- Free egress up to 3x stored volume, plus unlimited free egress through Cloudflare and other Bandwidth Alliance partners
- Simple, single-tier pricing with no minimum retention penalty
- 11 nines of published durability, matching AWS S3
- Public company with quarterly financial transparency
- Smaller company than AWS or Wasabi’s backers, with a narrower global data center footprint
- No storage tiers, so there’s no cheaper option for truly cold, rarely accessed data
- Fewer native integrations with third-party enterprise tooling than AWS
Wasabi Pros and Cons
- Simplest billing model of the three: one flat rate, no metered egress, no per-request fees for standard use
- Backed by a $1.8 billion valuation and institutional investors including Fidelity, suggesting long-term stability
- Reserved capacity plans can beat B2’s rate for large, predictable, multi-year workloads
- 90-day minimum storage retention penalizes workloads with high file turnover
- Price rose from $6.99 to $7.99 per TB in mid-2026, ending its run as the outright cheapest option
- Private company, so financial detail is limited compared with Backblaze’s public disclosures
- Fair-use egress policy isn’t a hard published number, creating some uncertainty for high-download workloads
AWS S3 Pros and Cons
- Deepest ecosystem integration of any provider: Lambda, CloudFront, IAM, Glacier tiers, and dozens of other AWS services
- Storage tiers from Standard down to Glacier Deep Archive fit almost any access pattern
- Largest global infrastructure footprint, useful for latency-sensitive, multi-region workloads
- Native to any stack already running compute and databases on AWS
- Roughly 3.3x Backblaze B2’s storage price and up to 9x its egress rate
- Egress fees can exceed storage costs for download-heavy workloads
- Pricing structure is more complex, with separate rates for storage class, egress, and multiple request types
The Verdict: Which Cloud Storage Should You Choose in 2026
Run the numbers across every scale in this comparison and one pattern holds: Backblaze B2 pricing wins on pure cost for the overwhelming majority of workloads, from a single terabyte through 500 terabytes and beyond, whether or not egress enters the equation. At $6.95 per terabyte per month with free egress up to three times stored volume, B2 is difficult to beat on price without moving to a cold-archive product like Glacier Deep Archive and accepting hours-long retrieval times in exchange.
Wasabi remains a strong second choice, particularly for teams that value billing predictability over squeezing out the last few dollars. A flat rate with no metered egress is genuinely easier to forecast than Backblaze’s 3x allowance, and the 90-day minimum retention rarely matters for backup and archival workloads that don’t churn files constantly. The July 2026 price increase to $7.99 per terabyte closed some of the gap with Backblaze, but Wasabi remains roughly 65% cheaper than AWS S3 Standard on storage alone.
AWS S3 is the right call when the decision isn’t really about storage pricing at all. Teams already running compute, databases, and networking inside AWS will often lose more in cross-cloud egress and operational complexity than they’d save by moving cold-storage workloads elsewhere. S3’s tiered pricing, down to sub-$1-per-terabyte Glacier Deep Archive rates, also means AWS isn’t automatically the expensive option for data that’s genuinely cold.
The practical framework: if storage cost is the deciding factor and the workload doesn’t need AWS-specific features, start with Backblaze B2. If predictable, flat-rate billing matters more than shaving the last dollar, Wasabi is a close second. If the application already lives inside AWS, or leans on Lambda, CloudFront, or IAM in ways that don’t have a B2 or Wasabi equivalent, S3’s premium is usually cheaper than the engineering time it would take to work around AWS-specific features elsewhere. For teams still weighing this against consumer-grade backup plans rather than developer object storage, our IDrive vs Backblaze comparison covers that adjacent decision, and our broader cloud computing coverage tracks pricing shifts like this one as they happen.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Backblaze B2 cheaper than Wasabi?
Yes, as of mid-2026. Backblaze B2 pricing sits at $6.95 per terabyte per month against Wasabi’s $7.99, a gap that opened after Wasabi raised its pay-as-you-go rate from $6.99 on July 1, 2026. Both remain far cheaper than AWS S3’s $23.00 per terabyte.
Does Wasabi really have zero egress fees?
For typical usage, yes, egress is free under Wasabi’s fair-use policy. But the policy isn’t a hard published number, and accounts that consistently download several times what they store each month may trigger a review or a request to change plans. It’s effectively free for backup and archival workloads, less predictable for high-download use cases.
Is Backblaze B2 S3-compatible?
Yes. Backblaze B2 supports an S3-compatible API alongside its native API, so most tools, SDKs, and scripts built for Amazon S3 work against B2 with only the endpoint URL and credentials changed.
What is Wasabi’s minimum storage retention policy?
Wasabi bills for a minimum of 90 days per object, regardless of how quickly it gets deleted. Delete a file one day after uploading it and the account is still billed as if it stayed for the full 90-day minimum. This mostly affects workloads with high file turnover rather than typical backup or archival use.
Can I use Backblaze B2 or Wasabi with AWS tools like the AWS CLI?
Yes. Since both expose S3-compatible endpoints, tools like the AWS CLI, boto3, rclone, and Terraform’s S3 provider can point at either service by changing the endpoint URL and supplying that provider’s credentials instead of AWS’s.
Which is more reliable: Backblaze B2, Wasabi, or AWS S3?
Backblaze B2 and AWS S3 both publish 11 nines, or 99.999999999%, of annual durability, the same figure. Wasabi doesn’t publish an equally specific durability number in the materials reviewed for this piece, though its architecture also relies on erasure coding across multiple facilities. None of the three reported a major publicized object storage outage in the 2025-2026 window covered by this comparison.
How much does 10TB of cloud storage cost per month?
At the headline pay-as-you-go rates covered in this piece, 10 terabytes costs about $69.50 a month on Backblaze B2, $79.90 on Wasabi, and $230.00 on AWS S3 Standard before any egress. Add 5 terabytes of monthly egress and the AWS bill jumps to $680 while B2 and Wasabi stay flat.
Is Backblaze B2 good for enterprise workloads?
It depends on what the enterprise actually requires. B2 supports Object Lock, versioning, and S3-compatible tooling that satisfy most compliance and backup requirements at a fraction of AWS’s price. What it doesn’t offer is AWS’s breadth of native integrations, so enterprises with workloads deeply tied to Lambda, IAM policies, or other AWS-specific services will generally find S3 a better technical fit despite the higher cost.
Related Coverage
For more cloud storage and cost-optimization coverage from Tech Insider:
- IDrive vs Backblaze: 5TB for $70 vs Unlimited [2026]
- Cloudflare R2 vs S3 vs Backblaze B2: $0 Egress [2026]
- AWS Reserved vs Savings Plans vs Spot: 90% Off [2026]
- Cloud Waste Hits 29% as AI Spend Breaks Budgets [2026]
- AWS Graviton vs Intel/AMD: 45% Cheaper, 25% Faster [2026]
- Step Functions vs Airflow: $0 vs $357/mo Floor [2026]
