The 90-Day Cliff: Wasabi vs. Backblaze B2 for Cloud Storage in 2026
Every quarter, I talk to at least a dozen teams that have hit the same wall. They need object storage for backups, media files, or app data. They narrow the field to Wasabi and Backblaze B2. And they freeze, because the price sheets look nearly identical — roughly $7/TB/month from Wasabi, $6/TB/month from Backblaze depending on how you count it.
The shopping paralysis is understandable for another reason: both vendors pitch themselves as the “cheap S3 alternative.” But they have very different revenue models, and those models create very practical tradeoffs. The Wasabi dashboard quotes you a great flat rate with no egress fees. Backblaze shows an ugly per-GB egress fee, then quietly gives you cheap cold storage and a free tier. Neither is fooling you; they’re just asking different questions about your data habits.
Here’s the shortened answer: if you move lots of data in and out of hot storage for your own apps, or you need S3-compatible performance at high volume, Wasabi is the fuss-free pick. If you have the classic “write once, read rarely” dataset — logs, cold archives, backups — Backblaze B2’s cold tier and the no-storage-minimum policy will almost certainly save you money. The 90-day cliff is Wasabi’s biggest gotcha; per-GB egress is Backblaze’s.
Quick Comparison Table
| Wasabi | Backblaze B2 | |
|---|---|---|
| Price range | Hot: $6.99/TB/mo; Cold: $3.99/TB/mo | Standard: $6/TB/mo; Cold: $3/TB/mo |
| Free plan | 30-day free trial ($100 credit) | Permanent 10 GB storage + 1 GB free daily egress |
| Best for | High-volume S3 replacing AWS, media workflows, startups that need free fast egress | Developers, backup target, data hoarders on a budget, cold storage |
| Key strength | Zero egress fees and a clean straight-ahead pricing model | Genuinely cheap cold tier plus flexible retention — no “3-month bill trap” |
| Key weakness | 90-day minimum retention on all deleted data | Egress fees pile up when you read too much hot data |
| G2 / Capterra rating | G2: ~4.6 / 5, Capterra: ~4.7 | G2: ~4.5 / 5, Capterra: ~4.6 |
| Founded year | Company founded 2015, launched 2017 | Backblaze founded 2007, B2 launched 2015 |
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Feature-by-Feature Deep Dive
1. Effective Storage Cost: The Simple Math
The startup pitch for both products is roughly the same: “way cheaper than AWS S3.” But the cost per retained terabyte depends on how because you store.
Wasabi’s base price for hot storage is $6