I had the opportunity in October to travel to PortAventura, Spain, for this year’s MSP GLOBAL conference, the annual gathering of MSPs, resellers, and IT leaders from around the world. What makes the event unique is its focus on open, practical discussion about how to run stronger, more sustainable businesses in the fast-changing MSP market. I joined the conversation to talk about a challenge that comes up in nearly every partner discussion I have: how to bring more predictability to cloud storage costs.

My session, Navigating Cloud Storage Economics, focused on one of the issues I hear most frequently: cloud storage bills are far harder to understand and predict than they should be. To make sense of the problem, I started by breaking it down into three categories:

• The known knowns are the expected fees: egress, retrieval, and tiering.

• The known unknowns are the ones we know exist but can’t easily quantify, like API operations or replication behavior.

• The unknown unknowns are the surprises that show up only when the bill arrives.

This is what partners are describing when they say cloud storage costs have moved beyond their control. Without clear visibility into what drives those numbers, decisions are made on instinct rather than insight, and that’s not a scalable strategy.

The cloud storage market’s fee problem

Cloud storage has been part of enterprise IT for decades, yet its pricing remains anything but transparent. Fee structures have grown increasingly complex, spread across regions, services, and usage types. It’s no surprise that many organizations struggle to get a clear view of their total cost of ownership.

Our 2025 strategy guide The Real State of Cloud for MSPs confirmed what many MSPs already experience: hidden fees dominate the market. Eighty percent indicated they exceeded their storage budgets last year, and 56% had business operations negatively impacted by cold storage performance delays.

It’s clear that cloud storage costs have become increasingly unpredictable and difficult to manage. When a significant share of spend goes to fees that are hard to anticipate, budgeting becomes reactive instead of strategic. What should be a stable, predictable expense has become one of the hardest areas of IT spend to manage.

Breaking down the real costs

During my MSP GLOBAL session, I walked through the invisible costs buried inside a typical cloud storage statement. What looks like a simple “dollars per terabyte” rate rarely reflects what MSPs actually pay. Most invoices are packed with micro-charges that quickly add up month after month. Here’s where they come from:

• API operations: Every upload, verification, and retrieval triggers a fee. Backup software, monitoring tools, and analytics jobs all keep data moving, and the meter never stops running. In one example, a one-petabyte dataset with one-megabyte objects generated roughly $4,900 a month in request fees. When those objects dropped to 128 KB, the same dataset produced $39,000, without a single byte of new capacity added.

• Replication and versioning: Many providers automatically copy and store data across multiple regions, charging for every movement. It sounds helpful until you realize those extra versions can double or triple your bill.

• Minimum billable object size: If your stored files are smaller than a provider’s billing threshold, you’re still charged as if they were larger. MSPs managing thousands of small backup objects often pay for space they never use.

• Tiering and lifecycle transitions: “Intelligent” tiering may sound smart, but each transition between hot and cold tiers adds another charge. Archive tiers often add retrieval fees and slow performance when you need data most.

What most people think of as storage isn’t just storage; it’s a series of background processes that all carry a price tag.

Egress and retrieval fees: the invisible tax on innovation

Few costs frustrate partners more than egress fees, or the charges for moving data out of a provider’s cloud. Every restore, migration, or validation test adds to the bill, and those charges are nearly impossible to predict. They vary by region, data type, and even time of transfer, which makes accurate forecasting a guessing game.

For many MSPs, an unexpected recovery or compliance audit can have a real financial impact. When those costs hit, they don’t just affect budgets, they affect behavior. Teams start limiting how often they test backups or move workloads, not because of technical limits, but because of cost concerns.

Insights from the Global Cloud Storage Index

The 2025 Global Cloud Storage Index offers a wider lens on how these challenges play out across the industry. Nearly half of every cloud storage dollar now goes to fees rather than capacity, with API operations, retrieval, and networking leading the list of cost drivers. The cost of simply using data is overtaking the cost of storing it.

That shift has real-world consequences. Cold tiers, for example, aren’t nearly as “cold” as they sound. Eighty-three percent of organizations using archive storage said they still access that data on a monthly basis, often triggering retrieval fees and slower performance right when they need it most.

The Index also highlighted a growing gap between security priorities and reality. While encryption and ransomware recovery remain high on the list, only 47% of respondents currently use object lock to make data immutable. In many cases, the added cost of turning it on outweighed the perceived benefit, another example of how unpredictable pricing works against best practice.

For MSPs, these findings confirm what they already know: data is far from static. Backups are verified daily, analytics run continuously, and compliance checks never stop. When billing models penalize normal data behavior, it becomes financially unsustainable.

Building a better cloud storage strategy

So what can MSPs take away from MSP GLOBAL 2025? The key is finding a way to make storage costs predictable. Here’s your starting point:

• Get visibility. Break down your monthly spend into capacity, operations, replication, and egress. You can’t fix what you can’t see.

• Question “low-cost” tiers. Archive storage often looks cheap until retrieval, API activity, and slower performance drive the bill higher.

• Simplify pricing. If your own costs fluctuate, your customer pricing will too. A single-tier model makes margin predictable.

• Build protection in. Immutability and object lock should come standard, not as paid extras that discourage good security practice.

That’s the thinking behind our approach at Wasabi: one performance tier, no egress fees, no API request charges, and no added cost for immutability. MSPs can store and access data freely without being penalized for normal use.

To see what that difference looks like, you can test it yourself. The Wasabi Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Calculator lets you model your current spend against traditional hyperscaler pricing. For many partners, the results are eye-opening.

Looking ahead

If there’s one thing MSP GLOBAL 2025 made clear, it’s that the conversation around cloud storage is shifting. For years, unpredictability was seen as the price of innovation, a tradeoff between flexibility and control. That mindset is changing. The new standard is transparency: knowing exactly what you’re paying for, when, and why.

The MSPs leading that change are the ones demanding simplicity from their partners and passing it on to their customers. They understand that predictable pricing is more than just saving money; it’s about building trust, protecting margins, and freeing teams to focus on growth instead of guesswork.

By removing egress and API fees and offering a single, high-performance tier, we help partners turn storage from a cost center into a competitive advantage. Because when the hidden fees disappear, performance, profitability, and partnership all come into sharper focus.