Skip to content
inetGeek

Amazon S3 vs Wasabi

SEPT 2026 audit

A comparison of Amazon S3 and Wasabi built from values read directly from each provider's own documentation, with the source recorded against every figure.

Reviewed by Palash BagchiUpdated 21 criteria comparedSources last checked

The short answer

Choose Amazon S3 if…

Workloads already inside AWS, where keeping data in the same region as the compute avoids the transfer charges that dominate an object storage bill.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Choose Wasabi if…

Anyone who wants one number. Capacity is the only charge — no egress fees, no API request fees — which makes the bill predictable in a way nothing else in this category manages.

Editorial · Palash Bagchi · approved

Consider something else if…

  • Amazon S3: Egress is the cost that decides this category and S3 charges for it, where R2, Wasabi and Tigris do not. Prices also vary by region, so a figure quoted anywhere is only true for the region it was read in.
  • Wasabi: The flat rate is $7.99 per terabyte whether you store a gigabyte or a terabyte of it, so small buckets pay for capacity they are not using. Check Wasabi's own terms for minimum storage duration before storing anything short-lived.

Neither quite fits? Every other option, ranked by iScore: Amazon S3 alternatives · Wasabi alternatives

10 sourced criteria separate them — see where, with sources, below.

Visit Amazon S3 documentationVisit Wasabi documentation

No affiliate links, sponsored placements or paid rankings appear on this site. Ordering follows the sourced data and the stated criteria.

01.

At a glance.

CriterionAmazon S3Wasabi
Pricing
Free tier
Yes
No
Kind of free offerIntroductory free tierFree trial
When the free offer ends
6 months after account creation; Free Tier credits expire 12 months after that date.
30 days.
Egress over allowance
$0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB a month out to the internet, after a free 100 GB aggregated globally. It falls to $0.085 above 10 TB, $0.07 above 50 TB and $0.05 above 150 TB. This is AWS's outbound data transfer rate rather than an S3-specific one — the charge that R2, Wasabi and Tigris do not levy at all.
None. Wasabi charges for capacity only, with no egress or API request fees.
Limits
Storage (entry plan)None. S3 has no plans and no included storage — AWS states there is no minimum charge and you pay only for what you use, billed per GB-month from the first byte. New accounts get AWS Free Tier credits ($100 immediately, up to $200 over six months) which are spendable credit rather than a standing storage allowance.None. Wasabi includes no free storage at any price. Pay-as-you-go carries a minimum monthly charge equal to 1 TB of active storage, so an account storing less than 1 TB is billed for 1 TB — a floor on the bill, not an allowance. Wasabi Cloud NAS has a 10 TB monthly minimum.
Infrastructure
Uptime SLA
99.9% for S3 Standard, Express One Zone and the Glacier retrieval classes; 99.0% for Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-Infrequent Access, One Zone-IA and Glacier Instant Retrieval.
Credits begin below 99.9% monthly uptime: 10% between 99.0% and 99.9%, 25% below 99.0%. Uptime is computed from five-minute error rates rather than downtime minutes.
Storage
Storage price$0.023 per GB-month for S3 Standard, first 50 TB, in us-east-1. S3 prices vary by region; this and every other S3 figure on the site is that region.$7.99 per TB per month, flat, with no separate charge for egress or API requests
Operations price
$0.005 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST and LIST requests, and $0.004 per 10,000 GET and all other requests, in us-east-1. DELETE and CANCEL are free.
None. API requests are not charged separately.
Minimum storage duration
None on S3 Standard. 30 days on Standard-IA and One Zone-IA, 90 days on Glacier Instant and Flexible Retrieval, 180 days on Glacier Deep Archive, each with a pro-rated charge for early deletion.
90 days on pay-as-you-go. Deleting an object sooner incurs a Timed Deleted Storage charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. Objects under 4 KB are billed as 4 KB.
S3-compatible APISupportedSupported
Compliance
ISO 27001Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.Wasabi's products and physical data center locations are ISO 27001 compliant.

Only criteria both providers publish appear here; a tinted cell marks a real difference. Criteria only one of them documents are listed below, and an absence there means we found no source — not that the feature is missing. How we source this.

The small bar above a value is inetGeek's own lean toward that side — computed from the same facts shown, never a number the provider published. See the picker below "The short answer" to weigh only the criteria you care about.

02.

Where they differ.

Free tier

Amazon S3
Yes
Wasabi
No
Sources (2) →

Kind of free offer

Amazon S3
Introductory free tier
Wasabi
Free trial
Sources (2) →

When the free offer ends

Amazon S3

6 months after account creation; Free Tier credits expire 12 months after that date.

Wasabi

30 days.

Sources (2) →
  • Amazon S3 Pricing ↗

    “The free plan will be available for 6 months after account creation. [...] All Free Tier credits must be used within 12 months of your account creation date.”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Try Wasabi Free ↗

    “Get full access to Wasabi free for 30 days [...] No auto-charge after the trial ends”

    Read 2026-09-13 · official site · Report a correction

Egress over allowance

Amazon S3
$0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB a month out to the internet, after a free 100 GB aggregated globally. It falls to $0.085 above 10 TB, $0.07 above 50 TB and $0.05 above 150 TB. This is AWS's outbound data transfer rate rather than an S3-specific one — the charge that R2, Wasabi and Tigris do not levy at all.
Wasabi
None. Wasabi charges for capacity only, with no egress or API request fees.
Sources (2) →
  • AWS Price List API — AWSDataTransfer, us-east-1 ↗

    “"$0 for 100GB of data transfer out to the internet, aggregated globally" [...] "$0.090 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out beyond the global free tier" [...] "$0.085 per GB - next 40 TB / month" [...] "$0.070 per GB - next 100 TB / month" [...] "$0.050 per GB - greater than 150 TB / month"”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pricing — Wasabi ↗

    “No charge for egress or API requests [...] With Wasabi, you pay just one low rate for capacity only. No hidden fees means you can plan your budget to the penny and never go over it, no matter how much you access your data.”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Storage (entry plan)

Amazon S3
None. S3 has no plans and no included storage — AWS states there is no minimum charge and you pay only for what you use, billed per GB-month from the first byte. New accounts get AWS Free Tier credits ($100 immediately, up to $200 over six months) which are spendable credit rather than a standing storage allowance.
Wasabi
None. Wasabi includes no free storage at any price. Pay-as-you-go carries a minimum monthly charge equal to 1 TB of active storage, so an account storing less than 1 TB is billed for 1 TB — a floor on the bill, not an allowance. Wasabi Cloud NAS has a 10 TB monthly minimum.
Sources (2) →
  • Amazon S3 Pricing ↗

    “Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum charge. Amazon S3 cost components are storage pricing, request and data retrieval pricing, data transfer and transfer acceleration pricing”

    Read 2026-09-07 · official pricing · Report a correction

  • Pay-as-you-go FAQs — Wasabi ↗

    “For customers using the Wasabi Pay as You Go pricing model, Wasabi has a minimum monthly charge associated with 1 TB of active storage”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

Uptime SLA

Amazon S3

99.9% for S3 Standard, Express One Zone and the Glacier retrieval classes; 99.0% for Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-Infrequent Access, One Zone-IA and Glacier Instant Retrieval.

Wasabi

Credits begin below 99.9% monthly uptime: 10% between 99.0% and 99.9%, 25% below 99.0%. Uptime is computed from five-minute error rates rather than downtime minutes.

Sources (2) →
  • Amazon S3 Service Level Agreement ↗

    “For requests to S3 Standard, S3 Express One Zone, S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval, S3 Glacier Deep Archive, and all other requests not specified below: Monthly Uptime Percentage Service Credit Percentage Less than 99.9% but greater than or equal to 99.0% 10% [...] For requests to S3 Intelligent-Tiering, S3 Standard-Infrequent Access, S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access, and S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval: Monthly Uptime Percentage Service Credit Percentage Less than 99.0% but greater than or equal to 98.0% 10%”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

  • Wasabi Service Level Agreement ↗

    “Service Credits Monthly Uptime Percentage Service Credit Percentage Equal to or greater than 99.0% but less than 99.9% 10% Less than 99.0% 25%”

    Read 2026-09-14 · official site · Report a correction

Storage price

Amazon S3
$0.023 per GB-month for S3 Standard, first 50 TB, in us-east-1. S3 prices vary by region; this and every other S3 figure on the site is that region.
Wasabi
$7.99 per TB per month, flat, with no separate charge for egress or API requests
Sources (2) →

Operations price

Amazon S3
$0.005 per 1,000 PUT, COPY, POST and LIST requests, and $0.004 per 10,000 GET and all other requests, in us-east-1. DELETE and CANCEL are free.
Wasabi
None. API requests are not charged separately.
Sources (2) →

Minimum storage duration

Amazon S3

None on S3 Standard. 30 days on Standard-IA and One Zone-IA, 90 days on Glacier Instant and Flexible Retrieval, 180 days on Glacier Deep Archive, each with a pro-rated charge for early deletion.

Wasabi

90 days on pay-as-you-go. Deleting an object sooner incurs a Timed Deleted Storage charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days. Objects under 4 KB are billed as 4 KB.

Sources (2) →
  • S3 Pricing — AWS ↗

    “S3 Standard-IA, and S3 One Zone-IA storage are charged for a minimum storage duration of 30 days [...] Objects that are archived to S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval and S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval are charged for a minimum storage duration of 90 days, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive has a minimum storage duration of 180 days.”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official docs · Report a correction

  • Pay-as-you-go FAQs — Wasabi ↗

    “Wasabi has a minimum storage duration policy that means if stored objects are deleted before they have been stored with Wasabi for a certain number of days (90 days when using the Wasabi Pay as You Go pricing model), a Timed Deleted Storage charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days will apply.”

    Read 2026-09-06 · official pricing · Report a correction

ISO 27001

Amazon S3
Covered under AWS's account-wide ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — not scoped per-service the way SOC, HIPAA and PCI DSS are on AWS's own site.
Wasabi
Wasabi's products and physical data center locations are ISO 27001 compliant.
Sources (2) →

When these numbers change, hear about it. Sources are re-checked monthly; a repricing goes out as a short note.

Confirm by email; unsubscribe from any issue. Your address goes to Kit and nowhere else — what we do with it.

03.

Documented by only one.

These criteria are published by one provider and not the other. An absence here means we have not found a source, not that the feature is missing — except where we say we read the other provider's own page on a given date and it does not state it. Those rows lean, and the provider can correct them with a link.

What the free plan includesAmazon S3: 100 GB a month of data transfer out to the internet, counted globally rather than per region. Storage itself is billed from the first byte.
Credit card to startWasabi: No
Pricing modelAmazon S3: Per region and per storage class, with storage, requests, retrievals, data transfer and management features each metered separately. AWS states there is no minimum charge, and bills storage in binary gigabytes — 1 GB is 2^30 bytes, not 10^9.
RegionsWasabi: 16 storage regions: six in the Americas, six in EMEA and four in Asia-Pacific. Several also answer to an alias URL, which is a second name for a region rather than a second region.
SOC 2Amazon S3: Listed as SOC-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.Wasabi: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-22 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Wasabi.
HIPAAAmazon S3: Listed as a HIPAA-eligible service on AWS's own reference page.Wasabi: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Wasabi.
GDPR / data residencyAmazon S3: AWS customers can process personal data on all AWS services in compliance with GDPR, and choose the storage type and geographic region for their data.Wasabi: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Wasabi.
PCI DSSAmazon S3: Listed as PCI DSS-compliant on AWS's own compliance scope page.
Encryption at restWasabi: Your data is encrypted in transit and at rest on the Wasabi cloud storage platform.Amazon S3: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Amazon S3.
Customer-managed keysWasabi: Customers can also supply their own encryption key during the API upload request.Amazon S3: not stated on its own page when read on 2026-09-21 — corrections welcome · every such claim about Amazon S3.
04.

Questions this comparison answers.

Free tier: Amazon S3 or Wasabi?

Amazon S3: Yes

Wasabi: No

Egress over allowance: Amazon S3 or Wasabi?

Amazon S3: $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB a month out to the internet, after a free 100 GB aggregated globally. It falls to $0.085 above 10 TB, $0.07 above 50 TB and $0.05 above 150 TB. This is AWS's outbound data transfer rate rather than an S3-specific one — the charge that R2, Wasabi and Tigris do not levy at all.

Wasabi: None. Wasabi charges for capacity only, with no egress or API request fees.

Storage (entry plan): Amazon S3 or Wasabi?

Amazon S3: None. S3 has no plans and no included storage — AWS states there is no minimum charge and you pay only for what you use, billed per GB-month from the first byte. New accounts get AWS Free Tier credits ($100 immediately, up to $200 over six months) which are spendable credit rather than a standing storage allowance.

Wasabi: None. Wasabi includes no free storage at any price. Pay-as-you-go carries a minimum monthly charge equal to 1 TB of active storage, so an account storing less than 1 TB is billed for 1 TB — a floor on the bill, not an allowance. Wasabi Cloud NAS has a 10 TB monthly minimum.

Should I choose Amazon S3 or Wasabi?

Pick Amazon S3 if Workloads already inside AWS, where keeping data in the same region as the compute avoids the transfer charges that dominate an object storage bill.

Pick Wasabi if Anyone who wants one number. Capacity is the only charge — no egress fees, no API request fees — which makes the bill predictable in a way nothing else in this category manages.

Provider pages

Amazon S3AWS object storage, priced per region — every figure here is us-east-1 (US East, N. Virginia) from the published price list.WasabiFlat-rate object storage sold per terabyte with no separate charges for egress or API requests.

Related comparisons

Amazon S3 vs Azure Blob StorageAmazon S3 vs Backblaze B2Amazon S3 vs Bunny StorageAmazon S3 vs TigrisAzure Blob Storage vs WasabiBackblaze B2 vs WasabiBunny Storage vs WasabiCloudflare R2 vs Amazon S3

Comments

Every page here is sourced and dated.