Every backup storage quote you will see this year leads with the same number — dollars per terabyte per month at rest. It is the wrong number. The bill that ends careers arrives after the ransomware event, when a 500TB full restore from S3 Standard runs roughly $45,000 in egress fees alone, before you have recovered a single VM. Meanwhile the same restore from Wasabi or a flat-rate vault costs nothing beyond what you were already paying.
This brief lays out verified mid-2026 list pricing for the four options enterprise buyers actually shortlist — Backblaze B2, Wasabi, AWS S3, and Veeam Data Cloud Vault — then does the math that matters: what the disaster costs, not what the idle copy costs.
The 2026 price table
List pricing as of mid-2026, US regions, pay-as-you-go unless noted. The last column is the one your CFO will remember.
| At-rest list price | Egress policy | Minimum retention | 500TB full-restore egress | Best fit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | $6.95/TB/mo | Free up to 3x average monthly storage, ~$0.01/GB beyond | None | $0 in practice | Cost-first secondary copies, short retention |
| Wasabi | $7.99/TB/mo | No egress fees within a 1:1 monthly ratio | 90 days per object | $0 | Long-retention archives, MSP fleets |
| Veeam Data Cloud Vault | $14–24/TB/mo flat, billed annually | Included in the flat rate, along with API calls | Annual commitment | $0 | Veeam shops that want one predictable line item |
| AWS S3 Standard | ~$23/TB/mo (us-east-1) | ~$0.09/GB to the internet, plus request charges | None (Standard tier) | ~$45,000 | Data that restores into AWS anyway |
What changed
The commodity tier got a repricing this spring. Backblaze moved B2 pay-as-you-go from $6 to $6.95/TB/month effective May 2026, dropping API transaction fees in the same change. Wasabi followed on July 1, raising pay-as-you-go from $6.99 to $7.99/TB/month across all regions, citing hardware, energy, and data-center costs. The era of sub-$7 object storage quietly ended this quarter, and nobody sent a press release worth reading.
Veeam, meanwhile, split Data Cloud Vault into Foundation and Advanced editions, starting around $14/TB/month with region choice and unlimited restores reserved for the higher tier. AWS list pricing for S3 Standard is essentially unchanged — roughly $23/TB/month for the first tier — which means the gap between hyperscaler and commodity object storage is still about 3x at rest and far wider once data moves.
The takeaway for a budget meeting: commodity backup storage went up 10–14 percent this year, but it is still the cheapest tier by a wide margin. If your renewal quote went up more than 15 percent, that is your vendor’s margin expanding, not the market.
Model the disaster, not the invoice
At-rest price is a comfort metric. The number that belongs in your business case is total cost across one full-scale restore, because that is the event the storage exists for. Run the scenario: 500TB of backup data, complete restore over the internet after a site loss or ransomware detonation.
- S3 Standard: 500,000GB at roughly $0.09/GB is about $45,000 in egress, plus per-request charges on millions of GET calls. An unbudgeted invoice, arriving in the worst week of your career.
- Wasabi: $0, provided your monthly egress stays within the 1:1 fair-use ratio — and a one-time full restore of what you store does.
- Backblaze B2: $0 in practice; the free allowance of 3x average monthly storage covers even a complete restore with room to spare.
- Veeam Vault: $0 beyond the flat rate you already committed to. That is the entire pitch.
The restore penalty compounds when recovery time matters, which is the same reason DR economics have shifted toward flat-rate models — we broke down the full recovery-cost picture in our DRaaS pricing analysis for 2026. Verdict: any backup storage decision made on at-rest price alone is a decision to self-insure against a five-figure egress bill.
Wasabi and Backblaze: same aisle, different fine print
Both are S3-compatible, both support object lock for immutability, and both undercut hyperscalers by roughly two-thirds at rest. The difference is retention math. Wasabi bills every object for a minimum of 90 days. For long-retention monthly and yearly backup points, that clause is irrelevant and Wasabi’s zero-egress model is clean and predictable — which is why it has become the default for MSPs. For short-lived data, it bites hard: a daily backup chain deleted after 30 days is still billed for 90, tripling the effective rate to roughly $24/TB/month — hyperscaler money for commodity storage.
Backblaze B2 has no minimum retention, which makes it the stronger fit for aggressive grandfather-father-son schemes with fast-expiring increments. Its weaknesses are the flip side of its price: fewer regions than Wasabi or the hyperscalers, and a smaller enterprise support organization — acceptable for a third copy, worth scrutiny if B2 is your only off-site tier. Both vendors’ immutability implementations differ in ways that matter for compliance; our immutable backup storage comparison covers the object-lock specifics.
Rule of thumb: retention under 90 days, Backblaze wins. Retention over 90 days, the two are within a rounding error, so pick on regions and support.
Veeam Vault: paying for predictability
Veeam Data Cloud Vault is Azure-backed object storage sold as a flat per-TB rate — $14 to $24/TB/month depending on edition, as of mid-2026 — with API calls, immutability, and restore egress folded into the price. That is 2–3x the commodity clouds at rest, and Veeam is not embarrassed by the comparison. The product exists for the buyer who has watched an S3 bill spike from API overhead during backup verification jobs and wants a number that never moves.
Where it is strong: zero bill-shock risk, immutable by default, and no finger-pointing between backup vendor and storage vendor when a restore goes sideways. Where it is not: it only makes sense inside a Veeam estate, it is billed annually upfront, and you are paying a meaningful premium over Wasabi or B2 for convenience you may not need if your team already manages object storage competently. For a Veeam shop with a lean ops team, the premium is defensible. For anyone else, it is not on the shortlist.
Where S3 still makes sense
Writing AWS off as the expensive option misses the cases where it is the rational one. If your production workloads run in AWS, restoring within the region avoids internet egress entirely, and the data-gravity argument is real. S3’s lifecycle tiering into Glacier Instant Retrieval and Deep Archive can push at-rest cost below $4/TB/month for compliance archives — cheaper than anything else in this table — as long as you price the retrieval fees and hours-long thaw times into your recovery plan.
The honest downside: complexity is the product. Between storage classes, request charges, retrieval tiers, and egress waivers, an accurate S3 backup TCO takes a spreadsheet and an afternoon. Most of the S3 backup bills we see in the field are 20–40 percent higher than the team estimated, and API charges from verification and synthetic-full operations are the usual culprit.
What to do about it
- Price the restore, not the rest. Add a “full restore cost” line to every storage comparison. If a vendor cannot give you that number in one email, that is your answer.
- Compute effective $/TB. Multiply list price by (minimum retention ÷ actual retention, floor of 1). Wasabi at 30-day retention is a $24 product, not an $8 one.
- Above $15/TB/month for commodity object storage without included egress, renegotiate or move. The 2026 market does not support that price.
- Test a 10 percent restore annually and capture the real invoice. Extrapolate it in your DR runbook so the $45,000 surprise is a budgeted line, not a career event.
- Benchmark cloud against on-prem before renewing. At sustained 500TB+ with fast-restore requirements, an on-site target can beat cloud economics — see our analysis of all-flash backup target economics before you sign a three-year cloud commit.
Frequently asked questions
How much does backup storage cost per TB in 2026?
As of mid-2026, commodity cloud object storage lists at $6.95/TB/month (Backblaze B2) to $7.99/TB/month (Wasabi). Flat-rate managed vaults such as Veeam Data Cloud Vault run $14–24/TB/month with egress included, and hyperscaler storage like AWS S3 Standard is roughly $23/TB/month before egress and request charges.
Is Wasabi cheaper than Amazon S3 for backups?
At rest, yes — roughly a third of S3 Standard’s list price, with no egress fees. The exception is short-retention data: Wasabi’s 90-day minimum storage duration means backups deleted within 30 days are billed at an effective rate near S3’s. For retention beyond 90 days, Wasabi is decisively cheaper, especially once restore egress is counted.
What are egress fees and why do they matter for backup?
Egress fees are per-gigabyte charges for moving data out of a cloud. For backup they matter because the entire dataset may leave at once during a disaster recovery — a 500TB restore from AWS S3 costs about $45,000 in egress at ~$0.09/GB, while zero-egress providers charge nothing for the same event.
Is Veeam Data Cloud Vault worth the premium over Wasabi or Backblaze?
For Veeam customers who value a single predictable invoice — with API calls, immutability, and restores included — the $14–24/TB/month flat rate can be worth 2–3x commodity pricing. Teams comfortable managing S3-compatible storage directly will usually save meaningful money with Wasabi or Backblaze B2 instead.
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