A Wasabi Alternative Built for Restic Backups

Wasabi and ServerCrate at a glance

How Wasabi bills small backup sets

Wasabi's Pay-Go object storage is listed at $7.99 per TB per month in North America, EMEA, and APAC, with free egress and free API requests under its fair use policies. That is a competitive price per terabyte.

The catch for smaller backups is the floor. Wasabi's pricing FAQ states a minimum monthly charge equal to 1 TB of active storage, even if you store less. A 100 GB laptop backup is billed as if it were 1 TB. Wasabi also bills objects smaller than 4 KB as 4 KB.

For a single server, a workstation, or a small office, that minimum often costs more than the data itself. Our plans are sized in steps that match common backup sets, so you pay for a tier close to what you actually store and move up when you need to.

• Storing 100 GB on Wasabi Pay-Go: billed at the 1 TB minimum, $7.99/mo
• Storing 100 GB on ServerCrate Lite: $2/mo
• Storing 250 GB on ServerCrate Starter: $3/mo
• Up to 10 GB on ServerCrate Free: $0, no card required

Minimum storage duration and Restic prune

Wasabi's pricing FAQ lists a 90-day minimum storage duration. If an object is deleted before 90 days, Wasabi charges Timed Deleted Storage for the remaining days. Wasabi's documentation also notes that the retention period can differ by pricing model, so check your own contract.

This matters for Restic because routine maintenance deletes data. When you run forget and prune, Restic rewrites and removes pack files. On a store with a 90-day minimum, packs removed shortly after upload keep costing money until the 90 days pass.

The effect is largest for frequent snapshots with short retention, such as hourly backups kept for a week, where pack files churn quickly. Long-lived archives that rarely change are less affected.

ServerCrate vaults have no minimum storage duration. Prune as often as your retention policy calls for, and your bill follows your plan, not your deletion history.

Native Restic REST instead of S3

Restic's official documentation covers Wasabi directly through the s3 backend: you point Restic at your bucket's regional service URL and supply access keys. It works, and you get Restic's client-side encryption either way.

ServerCrate speaks the Restic REST protocol over HTTPS, so there are no buckets, regions, or IAM policies to configure. Our one-command installer sets up the repository and credentials. Vaults are append-only by default: the backup credentials can add snapshots but cannot delete history, pruning runs with a separate cleanup key, and daily storage-level snapshots are kept for 14 days. That is a useful layer of protection against ransomware on the client.

Your encryption keys never leave your machine. We store ciphertext on ZFS and have no way to read your data.

With S3, every tool that touches the bucket needs correctly scoped keys and a matching endpoint. With a REST vault, Restic is the only client involved, and the repository URL is the whole configuration.

Knowing your backups actually work

Object storage tells you that bytes arrived. It does not tell you that last night's backup ran, or that a restore would succeed. With S3 storage, that monitoring is yours to build.

ServerCrate includes backup health reporting that tracks freshness and failures, plus public restore verification so you have evidence that data comes back, not just that it was uploaded.

When a backup goes stale or starts failing, you find out from the report instead of during an emergency restore.

• Freshness and failure reporting for each vault
• Public restore verification
• No egress or restore fees on any plan
• Post-quantum hybrid TLS (ML-KEM + X25519) on our endpoints
• Published warrant canary

Pricing that stays put

Wasabi moved Pay-Go pricing from $6.99 to $7.99 per TB per month, with existing customers seeing the new rate on their first billing cycle on or after July 1, 2026, according to Wasabi's May 2026 pricing FAQ.

ServerCrate uses a price lock: your renewal price never goes above the price you signed up at. Annual billing costs 10x the monthly rate, and every paid plan has a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Because we bill by plan rather than by request or deletion, a busy month of pruning, checks, and test restores costs the same as a quiet one. That makes backup spend easy to forecast for a homelab, a client server, or a small business.

If you outgrow 2 TB or need storage in several regions, that is a good moment to compare per-TB object storage again. We would rather you land on the right fit than overpay with either provider.