If you're using it for hot object storage and not as a cold backup, Wasabi has by far the worst egress situation of any object storage provider. They have "free" egress because egress is capped at 1 full retrieval per month, and they'll just ban you if you use more. R2 has actual, legitimately free egress. I think there's almost no overlap in use cases between Wasabi and R2 even though they're ostensibly both object storage providers.

The trick with Wasabi is that you are generally expected to not retrieve more than you’ve input in the same month, no?

“Less egress” would essentially be the trick on wasabi where zero egress cost is the defining feature of R2. Of course, there must be limits to it but it is interesting.

Wonder if at this point teams start to consider different S3 providers for different weekends

> The trick with Wasabi is that you are generally expected to not retrieve more than you’ve input in the same month, no?

No. It's basically one download of all your data in 1 month [1].

> For example, if you store 100 TB with Wasabi and download (egress) 100 TB or less within a monthly billing cycle, then your storage use case is a good fit for our policy. If your monthly downloads exceed 100 TB, then your use case is not a good fit.

In my experience it's an excellent fit for backups if you run disaster recovery tests quarterly on each set and have enough sets to run on a rotating, monthly schedule. You're only downloading about 25% per month at that point.

1. https://wasabi.com/paygo-pricing-faq/#free-egress-policy

I think it shows market failure when someone can offer exactly the same service as a competitor (an S3 API) for an 80% lower price, and not almost immediately take over the whole market.

I think governments need to step in and require that compute platforms like AWS are split up into constituent parts, and there is no cost disadvantage to mix-n-matching between suppliers. Eg. VM's on Azure and storage across the road in AWS should not require payment of egress fees that wouldn't be payable within either providers network.

There's a natural stickiness to cloud infra and SaaS which lends providers a pseudo monopolistic pricing power, even when competitors are present.

Some regulation requiring a common API and one click solution to transfer between providers would help solve this. Needs to be implemented intelligently though

One simple way to do it would be if the FTC announced:

> From January 1st 2023, we will consider it anti-competitive for cloud providers to price internal service bandwidth at a rate lower than internet bandwidth to a competing service.

Big companies like Amazon, Google or Microsoft could set the price to zero, and their smaller competitors would be losing a lot of money each month? Basically an easy way to get rid of the competition

Sounds like it would mostly benefit the large companies

It would be better if internet was considered basic infrastructure and funded by taxes like roads.

Yeah, a lot of thought needs to be put into the actual rule, but something along these lines... While accounting for unintended consequences

For storage you need trust, an S3 competitor doesn't help me if they lose my data or are unreliable. It takes time to earn that trust, and it's far from easy for small competitors to do that.

There's also performance / availability / capacity things to consider as well. It may be for some, but the $/storage isn't typically the whole story.