Wasabi vs RustFS: S3-Compatible Cost Showdown

Disclosure: I work on RustFS. Every comparison number below is pulled from a primary source and dated 2026-08-21, so check the Sources table before you budget. Wasabi wins on simplicity: one flat $7.99 per TB per month with no egress or API fees, ideal when you have no hardware and want 16 regions by this afternoon. RustFS wins on raw dollars per TB once you already own or colocate servers, because storage becomes disks you bought instead of a recurring bill. The real question is not "which is cheaper" but "who carries the hardware, power, and operations." Key Stats Metric Wasabi RustFS Storage price $7.99 / TB / mo (NA, EMEA, APAC) $0 / TB / mo — you supply disks Egress Free under fair-use (≤ stored volume / mo) Free — it is your own network API requests Free under fair-use Free Minimum term 90-day retention charge No minimum Minimum commitment 1 TB billed even if unused None Storage regions 16 regions Wherever you place the node Durability claim 11 nines (99.999999999%) Your redundancy Object Lock (WORM) Yes Not in README Feature table License Proprietary Apache 2.0 What This Cost Showdown Actually Measures A cost showdown between a cloud and a self-hosted object store is not a single price tag. It is the recurring opex of renting capacity versus the capital plus operations of owning it. Wasabi quotes a flat rate per terabyte per month and bills nothing extra for moving data in, out, or for API calls, within fair-use limits. RustFS is software you run; the bill is the servers, disks, power, and the engineer who gets paged. The comparison only makes sense once you know your dataset size, how long it lives, and whether you already pay for a rack somewhere. Everything below keeps those three variables explicit so the numbers stay honest. How Does Wasabi Price Storage? Wasabi's pay-as-you-go Hot Cloud Storage lists at $7.99 per TB per month across North America, EMEA, and APAC, with no separate charge for ingress, egress, or API requests (Wasabi pricing page, checked 2026-08-19). That flat rate is the headline and the reason backup vendors default to it. For 100 TB, the math is 100 × $7.99 = $799 per month, or $9,588 per year, before any minimums. Reserved-capacity terms in 1, 3, or 5-year blocks lower that further if you can commit capacity up front. What you do not see on the front page is the small print that decides whether your real bill matches the calculator, and that is where the next section lives. Where Does the Wasabi Bill Actually Bite? Three clauses in the pay-as-you-go FAQ change the number for real workloads. First, a 90-day minimum storage duration: delete an object before 90 days and you still pay "Timed Deleted Storage" for the remaining days, so high-churn data costs more than its live size suggests. Second, a 1 TB monthly minimum means storing 200 GB still bills a full terabyte. Third, objects under 4 KB are billed as 4 KB, and enabling versioning or bucket logging grows your stored bytes and your bill. Egress is free only while monthly downloads stay at or below your active stored volume; above that, Wasabi calls it "not a good fit" and can limit or suspend service. What Does RustFS Actually Cost to Run? RustFS charges nothing per gigabyte because it is software, not capacity. Your cost is hardware. A 24 TB enterprise HDD listed for roughly $400 to $600 in 2025 (market retail range), so raw capacity capital lands near $17 to $25 per TB one-time. Amortize that drive over a five-year life and disk capEx is about $3.40 to $5 per TB per year, before you account for mirrors or backups. Power, cooling, and rack space are extra, but your bandwidth is free because the data never leaves your network through a metered exit. The trade you accept is operations: patching, monitoring, and recovery are on you, not a support ticket. RustFS Feature Reality Check: What You Get, What You Don't RustFS's README Feature & Status table is the only honest source for what the software does today. Marked Available: S3 Core, Upload/Download, Versioning, Bucket Replication, Logging, Event Notifications, K8s Helm Charts, Keystone Auth, Multi-Tenancy, Swift API, Bitrot Protection, and Single Node Mode. Under Testing: Lifecycle Management, Distributed Mode, and RustFS KMS. The table does not list Object Lock, erasure coding, or a FUSE mount, so do not plan a WORM archive or a POSIX filesystem on RustFS yet. Read it plainly: single-node RustFS is ready now, multi-node redundancy is not a production promise. I work on RustFS, so weigh that against the README, not my enthusiasm. How Do the Two Compare on Cost-Relevant Features? Dimension Wasabi RustFS Footprint 16 managed regions Your hardware, your site Durability 11 nines (vendor claim) What you build (mirror or backup) Immutable retention Object Lock: WORM, legal hold Not available today Lifecycle / tiering Yes Under Testing Egress model Free under fair-use Your network, no meter Lock-in Proprietary account Apache 2.0, you own it The features that move cost are durability and lifecycle. Wasabi hands you 11 nines and Object Lock out of the box; RustFS hands you the software and expects you to supply redundancy until Distributed Mode ships. If compliance retention matters, that gap is the whole decision today. When Should You Pick Wasabi? Pick Wasabi when you have no servers and no interest in running storage. It is the faster path to 16 regions, data-residency choices across North America, Europe, and Asia, and immutable backups through Object Lock without standing up anything. The flat $7.99 per TB per month is easy to defend in a budget review because there is no egress line item to explain. For backup, DR, and active archive where someone else should carry the pager, the recurring fee buys absence of operational load. If your team's core product is not storage, renting it is usually the cheaper career move. When Does RustFS Win on Total Cost? RustFS wins when the dataset is large, stable, and already sitting on hardware you pay for. At 100 TB, Wasabi recurs at $9,588 per year; the same capacity as disks you own amortizes to a few dollars per TB per year in capital, and your egress is free because the traffic never crosses a metered provider link. The break-even is earlier the more you download, since Wasabi's fair-use cap bites exactly where RustFS has no meter. The catch is durability: until Distributed Mode leaves testing, mirror to a second node or back up to another S3 target yourself. You trade a recurring fee for owned infrastructure and Apache-2.0 freedom from lock-in. How Do You Point Your Tools at Each? Both speak the S3 API, so the same SDKs and CLI habits apply. For Wasabi, the MinIO Client connects with the commands from Wasabi's official doc: # Wasabi via MinIO Client (mc) — verbatim from docs.wasabi.com # [sourced from https://docs.wasabi.com/how-do-i-use-minio-client-with-wasabi, NOT EXECUTED IN CI] wget https://dl.minio.io/client/mc/release/linux-amd64/mc chmod +x mc ./mc config host add https://s3.wasabisys.com # prompts for access/secret key ./mc ls And the AWS CLI, also verbatim from Wasabi's doc: # [sourced from https://docs.wasabi.com/v1/docs/how-do-i-use-aws-cli-with-wasabi, NOT EXECUTED IN CI] aws s3 ls --endpoint-url=https://s3.wasabisys.com RustFS starts with the README's docker command: # [sourced from https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs, NOT EXECUTED IN CI] docker run -d -p 9000:9000 -p 9001:9001 \ -v $(pwd)/data:/data \ -v $(pwd)/logs:/logs \ rustfs/rustfs:latest Default credentials are rustfsadmin / rustfsadmin; change them before exposing port 9000. FAQ Is Wasabi really cheaper than AWS S3? At typical access volumes, yes. Wasabi's own comparison example sizes 100 TB stored with 20 TB downloaded per month at about $818 versus roughly $4,097 for AWS S3, once egress is included. The gap comes almost entirely from Wasabi's missing egress and API line items. Whether that beats self-hosting depends on whether you already own the hardware; the cloud comparison only holds against other clouds. Does RustFS charge per gigabyte? No. RustFS is open-source software under Apache 2.0; you run it on your own disks and pay no per-GB fee and no egress fee, because the data stays on your network. Your cost is the servers, drives, power, and the operations work to keep them healthy. Treat it as capital and labor, not a metered bill. Can RustFS replace Wasabi for immutable backups? Not today for compliance retention. RustFS's README Feature & Status table does not list Object Lock, while Wasabi and Backblaze B2 both offer S3 Object Lock with WORM and legal hold. If you need ransomware-immutable, audit-ready retention, use Wasabi, B2, or Ceph now and keep RustFS for analytical and batch object workloads where immutability is not the requirement. What is Wasabi's 90-day minimum storage policy? Objects deleted before they have been stored 90 days incur a "Timed Deleted Storage" charge for the remaining days, comparable to minimum-duration policies on some hyperscaler tiers. It mainly hurts high-churn workloads where data lives for days or weeks. For long-lived archives it is invisible, because the data stays past the threshold anyway. Is RustFS production-ready? Single-node RustFS is marked Available and is a reasonable place to start today. Distributed Mode, Lifecycle Management, and RustFS KMS are still Under Testing, so multi-node redundancy and automated tiering are not production promises yet. Run a single node and mirror or back it up to a second S3 target until Distributed Mode ships; do not bet a WORM archive on it yet. Sources All claims checked against these primary sources on 2026-08-21. Claim Source $7.99/TB/mo, no egress/API fees, 1 TB monthly min, 90-day retention, 4 KB min object, fair-use egress cap https://wasabi.com/pricing , https://wasabi.com/pricing/faq 16 storage regions, S3 + IAM API, Object Lock, 11 nines durability https://wasabi.com/cloud-object-storage Wasabi mc commands https://docs.wasabi.com/how-do-i-use-minio-client-with-wasabi Wasabi AWS CLI commands https://docs.wasabi.com/v1/docs/how-do-i-use-aws-cli-with-wasabi RustFS Feature & Status, docker run, default creds, Apache 2.0, 1.0.0-rc.3 https://github.com/rustfs/rustfs Enterprise 20TB+ HDD retail range $400-$600 (2025), used as raw-capacity cost anchor https://www.accio.com/business/hdd-failure-rate (market summary, "Enterprise High-Capacity HDDs (20TB+)" section)