This is the first in a series of blog posts based on excerpts from our new eBook, Demystifying Cloud Object Storage: The Ultimate Guide to the Hidden Fees That Can Break Your Budget. It is designed to help you understand the worst of these fees, when they’re triggered, and how they can rapidly add up to negatively impact your budget and your business decision-making.

The cloud storage industry has a fee problem

Cloud storage fees for egress are a big problem, one that’s made headlines in recent years for being an anti-competitive practice among the hyperscalers. However, an even greater problem are the countless fees for API requests and everyday operations that most leading cloud storage providers charge for data stored in their environments. These opaque pricing practices, coupled with complex tiering models, make it next to impossible for customers to understand, let alone predict, what their total storage costs will be. It’s a big reason why 62% of IT organizations went over their cloud storage budgets in 2024.

API-based data operations fees for reads, writes, and lists are some of the most recognizable. But these are just the tip of the iceberg, with lesser-known fees for such things as object lock, object lifecycle policies, and replication making a substantial impact on monthly billing.

On the face of it, these fees look harmless—typically only a fraction of a cent per GB or per 1,000 requests. However, when you multiply them by the millions or tens of millions of operations that can easily occur each month as your data store scales, your total costs can skyrocket.

A real-world example with real business consequences

This example is from an actual monthly bill for AWS S3 Standard Service from Amazon. The total amount of data stored was approximately 250 TB. All the extra fees in addition to storage capacity totaled $4,008.93 or 41% of the total bill. This is in line with results from the 2025 Wasabi Cloud Storage Index where IT respondents reported, on average, that 49% of their total cloud storage costs were spent on fees in 2024.

Let’s break down this bill:

• PUTObject

  PutObject, or simply PUT requests, are the API calls and associated fees required to write each object to a bucket in an hyperscale cloud environment. Here, you’re already spending nearly 10% of your total costs just to upload your data.

  

• GetObject

  GET request fees are charged simply for requesting access to your data—not actually accessing your data. There are fees for that, too! And it can get complicated. If you want to learn more, check out our cloud cost optimization ebook.

  

• ListBucket and ListBucketVersions

  These operations help you manage your data. ListBucket returns a list of all the S3 buckets in your account. It’s typically used to get an overview of all storage containers (buckets) you have created, along with metadata such as the bucket names and creation dates. This operation is essential for managing multiple buckets and selecting which bucket to work with for various operations. ListBucketVersions returns details on every version of the objects stored—including previous versions and delete markers—allowing users to audit, manage, and potentially restore earlier versions of their data. Together, these fees add up to nearly 11% of the total bill.

  

• HeadObject

  This API call is for retrieving the metadata of an object. It is commonly used to check if an object exists, verify its size, last-modified date, storage class, and other metadata attributes. This operation is particularly helpful in backup and data validation workflows, where ensuring that the expected object is present and has the correct properties. While not terribly costly, other related fees, such as ListObject or ListObjectV2 that backup applications use to verify your backed up data can easily blow up your budget.

  

• UploadPart

  UploadPart is an API call related to multipart uploads, a feature that breaks up large files such as video, high-rez images, or massive datasets into smaller chunks for more efficient data transfer over the public internet. The hyperscalers charge for initiating and completing a multipart upload. The costs may seem trivial in this example, but when dealing with thousands of files—especially in media-heavy workflows like video production, surveillance, or big data analytics—these fees accumulate quickly. If your workflow is upload-intensive, your API costs can spiral out of control, turning what seemed like an affordable storage solution into a financial burden.

  

• WriteObjectLockRetentionInfo

  By far the biggest fee on this bill—making up more than 46% of the total cost—is the extra cost for enabling S3 Object Lock for immutability. While the hyperscalers don’t charge for turning on Object Lock, they do charge for WriteObjectLockRetentionInfo and other related API requests. This operation specifies how long an object must be retained and under which mode (governance or compliance), in order to enforce immutability. Essentially, it ensures that an object cannot be deleted or overwritten until the defined retention period expires, which is critical for meeting regulatory or internal data protection requirements.

  

Storage fees don’t just break budgets, they interfere with decision-making

This is just a small example of the types of fees that dramatically inflate your total cost of ownership (TCO). And while they are bad for your bottom line, they become a bigger problem when they start impacting your business decision-making, resulting in potentially dangerous tradeoffs:

• How many backup cycles can we afford? Should we reduce our number of incremental backups?

• How often can we test and validate our backups?

• Can we afford to turn on Object Lock for increased cyber resiliency?

• Do we have the extra budget needed to retrieve our data for analytics, content repurposing, or for training new AI/ML workloads?

If you’re asking yourself these types of questions, you’re not alone. According to the 2025 Wasabi Cloud Storage Index, 56% of global respondents say their organization experienced IT or business delays due to cloud storage fees like egress and/or data access.

Understanding cloud storage fees is the first step to reducing your TCO

There are more than 100 S3 API requests, and most of them come with fees—fees that are different based on the tier of service and region of service you choose. It’s complicated. It’s more than complicated. It’s ridiculous.

So, what’s an IT decision-maker to do? Well, you can migrate your data to low-cost, fee-free Wasabi. Now’s a great time as we are currently offering 50% off your migration.

If you’re not quite ready to pull the trigger, I’d encourage you to learn more about these different fees from the hyperscalers and how each of their service tiers compare to Wasabi in terms of your total cost of ownership. You can do that by downloading our free Ebook, Demystifying Cloud Object Storage: The Ultimate Guide to the Hidden Fees That Can Break Your Budget.

But don’t take too long to decide. That migration discount I mentioned expires June 30, 2025.