Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi vs plain S3 as a media backend in 2026

If you are putting raw camera footage and finished masters into object storage, the headline per-TB price is the least interesting number on the page. What decides your real bill is how that footage moves: how often you pull it back, how long it sits before you delete it, and what the provider charges when your download habits do not match the shape they designed for. Backblaze B2, Wasabi, and Amazon S3 all advertise themselves as places to keep media, but they bill on three genuinely different philosophies. This is the per-TB math, the egress rules, and the minimum-storage windows, compared honestly for 2026.

Three pricing philosophies, not three price tags #

Before the numbers, it helps to know what each provider is actually selling. Think of it like renting a storage unit. S3 charges you for the unit, then meters every trip you make to the door and every time you open the lock. Wasabi charges a flat rent and lets you come and go, but only if you do not treat the unit like a busy shop floor. B2 sits in between: cheap rent, a generous number of free trips, and a small fee past that.

Concretely, S3 Standard meters storage, egress, and per-request operations separately (checked Jun 2026). Wasabi sells capacity at one flat rate with no egress or API fees, but enforces a fair-use ceiling on how much you download relative to what you store. B2 prices capacity low, gives free egress up to three times your stored amount, then charges a modest overage. None of these is a trick. They are just optimized for different traffic patterns, and media work has a very specific traffic pattern.

The per-TB storage math #

On raw storage rate, the three are closer than the marketing suggests, and one of them just got more expensive. Wasabi's pay-as-you-go rate rose from $6.99 to $7.99 per TB per month effective July 1, 2026 (checked Jun 2026 on Wasabi's pricing page). B2 standard storage starts at $6.95 per TB per month. S3 Standard is the outlier at roughly $0.023 per GB, which works out to about $23.55 per TB per month for the first 50 TB tier.

Two footnotes matter for small shops. Wasabi bills a minimum of 1 TB per account even if you store less, so it is a poor fit if your active library is genuinely tiny. And S3 Standard's headline rate is three times the others because you are paying for the option to move data fast and frequently, an option a backup or archive bucket rarely uses. If your media is mostly cold, S3 Glacier Deep Archive drops to about $1.01 per TB per month, cheaper than anyone, with a 180-day minimum and retrieval latency as the price.

Egress: where media bills explode #

Egress is the data you download back out, and for video it is the line item that quietly dwarfs storage. A finishing pass that pulls 20 TB of source files back down to a workstation is a normal week for some shops. Here is how each backend treats that.

S3 charges per gigabyte out: about $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB each month, dropping to $0.085 and then $0.07 per GB at higher tiers, after a 100 GB free allowance shared across all of AWS (checked Jun 2026 on the S3 pricing page). Pulling back 20 TB in a month at the entry tier is roughly $1,800 in egress alone, more than the cost of storing 200 TB of media on B2 for that month. That is the number that sends teams looking for alternatives.

B2 includes free egress up to three times your average monthly stored amount, then charges $0.01 per GB ($10 per TB) past that. Store 100 TB and you can download 300 TB a month for free. B2 also waives egress entirely through partner CDNs and compute providers including Cloudflare, Fastly, and bunny.net, which is a real lever if you serve proxies or deliverables through a CDN. Wasabi charges nothing for egress at all, with no per-GB line, but governs it through fair use rather than a meter.

Minimum-storage windows and the early-delete tax #

This is the catch most editors miss until the invoice arrives. Several of these backends bill you for keeping data even after you delete it, because they assume you committed to a minimum retention period. It is the cloud equivalent of a phone contract: leave early and you still pay out the term.

Wasabi enforces a 90-day minimum on its pay-as-you-go plan. Upload 1 TB and delete it after 15 days, and you are still billed a Timed Deleted Storage charge for the remaining 75 days, roughly $20 of a $24 quarter rather than the $4 you actually used (checked Jun 2026 in Wasabi's documentation). For working footage that churns weekly during an edit, that turns a cheap flat rate into a real cost. S3 Standard has no minimum window, but its colder classes do: Standard-IA and One Zone-IA hold a 30-day minimum, Glacier Instant and Flexible Retrieval a 90-day minimum, and Glacier Deep Archive a 180-day minimum, with early deletion billed pro rata. B2 standard storage has no minimum retention fee at all, which makes it the friendliest of the three for media that moves in and out during active production.

Which backend fits which workflow #

The honest answer depends on your egress-to-storage ratio. If you download roughly as much as you store each month or less, Wasabi's flat rate is hard to beat once you are past 1 TB and your data sits longer than 90 days. It is built for backup, archive, and reference libraries that you read occasionally, not churn daily. If your downloads spike well past what you store, say you are constantly pulling masters back for re-edits, B2's 3x free egress and zero minimum window give you the most headroom, and the Cloudflare egress waiver is a genuine escape hatch for CDN-served delivery. S3 earns its premium only when you need its ecosystem: Lambda, MediaConvert, fine-grained IAM, or multi-region replication. As a pure media bucket it is the most expensive option here on both storage and egress, which is exactly why so many teams use S3-compatible alternatives instead.

Worth naming the bigger picture too. All three are object stores, not editing volumes. None of them is something you scrub a 6K timeline against directly. To edit off any of them you need a layer in front that streams blocks on demand and caches locally, which is the lane a real mount occupies and where block-level streaming beats whole-file sync. JuiceMount uses an S3-compatible backend like B2 or Wasabi as its origin while keeping the working set on local SSD, so the egress math above is exactly the math that decides your monthly bill. Where it does not fit: if your footage is genuinely cold and you never touch it, you do not need a mount, you need a cheap archive tier and patience.

Reading the real bill before you commit #

Run your own numbers with one month of honest traffic, not the brochure. Estimate four things: average TB stored, TB downloaded per month, how long files live before deletion, and whether you serve anything through a CDN. Then the choice falls out. Cold and stable, low egress, longer than 90 days: Wasabi or, for true archive, S3 Glacier. High or spiky egress with churn: B2, especially behind Cloudflare. Deep AWS integration required: S3 and accept the premium. The same discipline applies whether you are pricing a raw bucket or comparing it against a managed service, which is the trap we walk through in the real LucidLink bill and the broader cost of leaving any platform you build on.