How does the cost of Wasabi compare to the true cost of AWS S3?

When comparing the cost of Wasabi storage to the cost of the various AWS object storage offerings including S3, S3-IA, S3 One Zone-IA, and Glacier, it is important to look beyond the initial per-GB/mo price of the storage itself. This is because as explained in this article, AWS has a host of other charges that will significantly increase the cost of their storage relative to Wasabi.

Let's consider a few examples and start with a review of the cost of S3 Standard for a 100 TB storage use case involving 10% storage download per month. Using the AWS cost calculator, we start with by filling in the amount of storage (100 TB in our example):

Then, because AWS charges you for API calls, you then need to somehow figure out how many PUT/COPY/POST (write actions) and GET (read actions) requests your use case might require.  The total number of requests can vary wildly depending on the read/write activity of your storage application. Unless you are a storage scientist, it can be quite challenging to estimate this value. This is one of the reasons why Wasabi doesn't charge for API requests. For this example, we will assume the use case requires 100K requests for write and 100K request for read actions per month.

Then, because AWS charges you for 'data transfer' or the egress of your data from their service, you have to add that to the calculator.   Many of our customers tell us that it's hard to estimate this number, which is one of the reasons why Wasabi doesn't charge for egress under our free egress plan.  For this example, we will use the example of 10% of the 100 TB stored data downloaded (10 TB) per month.

If you were to take the same use case of 100 TB with 10% download per month and calculate it with Wasabi using our calculator at wasabi.com/pricing, you will see how much simpler it is to understand the true cost of your storage.     

In this example, you can see that it's $599/mo with Wasabi and over $3,500/mo with AWS S3* (AWS is 7x more expensive!)

*this AWS example includes a $322.96 charge for AWS Support (Business) that the AWS Calculator always includes in AWS cost estimates (the price of the AWS support package is variable and based on the cost of the storage service).    Wasabi does offer an optional Premium Support package at $300/mo (regardless of the amount of storage service).    Even if you exclude the paid support packages, AWS is still more than 6x expensive at over $3,200/mo vs. Wasabi at $599/mo.

Now, let's consider an even more complicated example using a relative new AWS object storage offering announced in April 2018:  S3 One Zone IA.      As AWS states, this new offering 'is designed for customers who want a lower-cost option for infrequently accessed data'    So, it's not really a true comparable to Wasabi hot cloud storage (which is low cost but designed for high-performance with frequently accessed data).   But, let's walk through the pricing comparison anyway since the S3 One Zone IA offering may be tempting at a storage price of $.01/GB/mo (compared to the S3 Standard price of $.023/GB/mo).

For our 100 TB example involving 10% download per month, you are looking at this AWS cost breakdown:

S3 One Zone IA Storage: $1,024 (100 TB * $.01/GB/mo)

API Requests: $1.10 (for 100K write & 100K read actions)

Data Retrieval: $102.40 (for 10% download per month; an extra fee AWS makes you pay with the IA offers on top of the data transfer fee!)

Data Transfer (egress): $952.51 (for 10% download per month)

AWS Business Support: 230.38

S3 One Zone IA Storage Total:  $2,310.39

Wasabi Storage Total: $599

As the above numbers show, the new S3 One Zone IA 'infrequent access' storage service is over 3x more expensive than Wasabi's superior hot cloud storage service for our sample use case.

If you have other AWS vs. Wasabi pricing comparisons would like to discuss with us, please drop us a note.