Start with archive-friendly economics (validate restore behavior)
For backup and archival workloads — data written once and rarely accessed — independent providers like Wasabi and Backblaze B2 offer 3-5x lower storage costs than S3 with zero or near-zero egress for recovery. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem, less geographic coverage, and less mature lifecycle management tooling. Wasabi's 90-day minimum retention billing is the main gotcha — short-lived backup data or rapidly-overwritten files become expensive. For data you store for months at a time and rarely read, the cost savings are hard to argue against.
- Recommendation: Wasabi, Backblaze B2
Recommended starting points
Based on your constraints, these products typically fit best. Read each decision brief to confirm pricing behavior and limits match your reality.
Wasabi
Cost-driven, S3-compatible object storage commonly evaluated for backups and large storage footprints. Buyers choose it when predictable storage economics matters more than hyperscaler ecosystem bread
Backblaze B2
Cost-driven object storage for backups and media libraries, often evaluated versus Wasabi and S3 when the decision is pricing mechanics (egress + requests) rather than raw storage price.
Why this recommendation
For backup and archival workloads — data written once and rarely accessed — independent providers like Wasabi and Backblaze B2 offer 3-5x lower storage costs than S3 with zero or near-zero egress for recovery. The trade-off is a smaller ecosystem, less geographic coverage, and less mature lifecycle management tooling. Wasabi's 90-day minimum retention billing is the main gotcha — short-lived backup data or rapidly-overwritten files become expensive. For data you store for months at a time and rarely read, the cost savings are hard to argue against.