How API Fees Like PUT Requests Can Blow Your Backup Budget

This article, part of our ongoing series about the total cost of ownership (TCO) of cloud storage, examines the issue of PUT requests.  

When planning a backup strategy, the cost of storage is part of the total package. A savvy CIO might even budget for data egress as part of a disaster recovery plan. But one thing that almost no IT manager budgets for is data ingest. In fact, 21% of respondents to the 2025 Wasabi Cloud Storage Index say data ingest fees contribute the most to the total amount of cloud storage fees they accumulate. A regular backup cadence is an essential part of a healthy data security regimen, but the cost of ingesting all that data can do a number on your budget projections.  

Scenario: cloud backup requiring 100 TB of storage capacity 

It helps to have a concrete example to work with when trying to understand the potential for high API fees. Otherwise, they may seem like a hard-to-estimate abstraction. Consider the following common enterprise scenario: You need to back up 100 TB of data to the cloud for one month. What’s the true cost of that backup? Let’s break it down. 

To keep things simple, let’s assume we’re using a popular cloud backup application, such as Veeam, where backup data is typically stored as 1 MB objects. Veeam backs up 100 TB of data as 100,000,000 separate 1 MB objects. 

In this simplified scenario, we are only focusing on the total cost of the initial 100 TB backup, which consists of two components: 

1. Storage fees—The per‑TB storage cost of storing the initial full backup for one month, calculated as (cost per TB/month x 100 TB) 

2. API fees—The PUT request fees required to write each object to buckets in the cloud environment. PUT Fees are calculated (as PUT Fee per 1,000 requests). Keeping things simple, we’ll assume every object requires 1 API call PUT request. Dividing 100 million individual objects by 1,000 requests we get 100,000 billing units or (PUT fee x 100,000). 

The table below summarizes the storage and API fees for the different tiers available from AWS S3.  

Using this table, we can estimate the cost of backing up 100 TB of data in 1 MB objects. When we combine storage fees and API PUT requests, this is the result: 

When we compare Wasabi with the four most popular AWS storage tiers used for backup workloads, S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval would appear to be the most cost-effective choice when comparing per-TB costs. However, once you add the PUT request fees for writing objects to buckets, the cost of Glacier soars. This is just the beginning. In the real world, API-based costs would continue to mount with each incremental backup and as your total dataset grows—not to mention the many other additional fees for validating and retrieving your backups. The bottom line? Your total cost of ownership only gets more complicated and more expensive the more data you store with the hyperscalers. 

Wasabi’s surprise-free approach 

Wasabi offers a cloud storage solution that eliminates the problem of high API fees and bad surprises when the bill comes. Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage is only $6.99 per TB per month and doesn’t levy any fees for API requests or egress, resulting in a dramatically lower total cost of ownership. 

In terms of performance, Wasabi is comparable to AWS S3 Standard, yet it costs dramatically lower right out of the gate. Amazon and the other hyperscalers offer colder storage tiers like AWS S3 Standard-IA or even Glacier as a way for customers to lower storage costs by tiering data they rarely expect to access. Unfortunately, while these colder tiers offer lower storage rates, the API request fees for things such as PUT, GET, and LIST operations are substantially higher—which leads to a drastically high total cost of ownership.