Why Immutability is Free at Wasabi

Modern cyberattacks often rely on malicious modifications of valuable business data. Ransomware may encrypt, corrupt, or delete data and charge a ransom to restore it. Cybercriminals may even rewrite log files in an attempt to cover their tracks.  

Data immutability — which prevents data from being altered, encrypted or deleted — is an invaluable defense against cyber threats such as ransomware. By leveraging Object Lock technology for data immutability, organizations can enforce immutability at the storage layer, ensuring that once data is written, it remains tamper-proof and secure. This effectively removes an attacker's ability to modify or delete compromised data, significantly limiting the scope and impact of a cyberattack.  

However, organizations that rely on cloud backups for secure, immutable data storage may be paying a significant sum for that protection. Cloud service providers implement and manage Object Lock via API requests, which are billed as additional charges on top of an organization’s storage costs. In addition to added complexity and unpredictability, these charges can dissuade organizations from adopting immutability altogether, diminishing their overall data security. 

The price of security 

While hyperscale cloud storage providers don’t charge for Object Lock, per se, enabling and maintaining immutable storage via Object Lock can require significant API operations which do come at a cost to the user. For example, Object Lock may perform large numbers of API operations during the lifecycle of a locked object. These each serve a unique function such as enabling retention settings (PutObjectRetention), identifying object versions (GetObjectVersion), or checking an object’s immutability parameters (GetBucketObjectLockConfiguration). Since AWS charges for each of these API operations, a business may not be aware of the true cost of enabling Object Lock until the end of their next billing cycle.  

The following image, drawn from our cloud cost optimization eBook, details the fees from a company’s real monthly AWS bill. Note that the cost for the WriteObjectLockRetentionInfo API operation, which is responsible for setting Object Lock duration, is the most expensive non-storage part of the bill at nearly half the cost of storage itself.  

API fees fluctuate based on the amount of storage used and the frequency of interactions with stored data during a given billing period, leading to potentially significant month-to-month variability. With this high (and hidden) price tag, it should come as no surprise that many businesses choose to forego the security benefits of Object Lock. According to our 2025 Cloud Storage Index survey, only 47% of companies take advantage of immutability protection despite the fact that 99% agree that it’s a valuable security tool. 

Why immutability is free at Wasabi 

Wasabi takes a fee-free approach to cloud storage. There are no charges for data egress or API requests, making your storage costs low and predictable month-to-month; as long as you know how much data you’re storing, you know how much your bill will be.   

In the case of Object Lock, this means that companies can achieve immutability in the cloud with no additional fees for the associated API operations. This has significant potential implications for corporate security and compliance programs, which may rely on the ability to protect sensitive business data from being modified, encrypted or deleted by a threat actor. 

Providing immutability at no additional cost enhances data security and integrity across all storage environments, ensuring widespread protection without financial barriers. No one benefits if critical data is accidentally deleted, and the ability to maintain secure, immutable backups is a valuable tool in the fight against ransomware. 

Wasabi’s low-cost, fee-free approach to cloud storage has the potential to dramatically lower your cloud storage bill and improve the predictability of your cloud spend. We even created an immutability cost calculator to show what the cost of data security from the hyperscalers is doing to cloud storage bills. This intuitive tool compares the costs of immutability across various cloud providers—and shows what it would cost with Wasabi (spoiler: nothing). Try it out and see how much you could be saving.