5 Object Storage Providers Without Minimum Retention Periods in 2026

Here is a bill nobody budgets for: paying to store data you already deleted.

Minimum storage duration policies are one of the least visible costs in object storage. You upload an object, you delete it a week later, and you are still charged as if it sat there for 30, 90, or even 180 days. The per-TB price on the pricing page is real. It is just not the whole calculation.

This matters more than it sounds, because plenty of ordinary workloads write and delete constantly: rolling backup retention, CI artifacts, temporary exports, image processing pipelines, cache tiers, and anything with a lifecycle rule that expires objects after a few days.

Here is who charges early deletion fees, and five providers that do not.

Who has minimums, and how long

Wasabi is the one that surprises people most, because it is not an archive tier, it is the main product. Delete an object before it has met its 90 days on Pay-Go and a "Timed Deleted Storage" charge covers the remaining days. Wasabi also raised its rate from $6.99 to $7.99 per TB in July 2026.

The AWS and Google minimums are more defensible, since they apply to cold storage classes where the whole deal is cheaper storage in exchange for less flexibility. They still bite when a lifecycle rule transitions objects to Glacier and then something deletes them a month later.

Now the providers that do not do this.

1. Sliplane Object Storage: no minimums of any kind

Sliplane Object Storage has no minimum retention period, no early deletion fee, no minimum billable object size, and no per-bucket fee.

Pricing is 5 EUR per 250 GB per month, excluding tax, with the first GB free. There are no egress fees and no request fees. Billing is based on your average storage across the month, so 1 TB stored for 15 days averages out to two 250 GB blocks, or 10 EUR.

That averaging model is the practical opposite of a retention minimum. Data you delete stops costing you money from the moment it is gone, proportionally, rather than continuing to bill against a policy.

Feature-wise you get S3 compatibility, object versioning, object locking, and scoped access keys, with storage in Germany and US East at the same price. Worth noting that versioning and retention interact: if you enable versioning, old versions still count as stored data until a lifecycle rule or an explicit delete removes them.

Use Sliplane if:

• Your workload writes and deletes frequently.
• You want no retention, request, or egress fees to model.
• You want German or US storage with versioning and object locking.
• You want to split data across many buckets for free.

Skip it if:

• You are archiving many terabytes of genuinely cold data, where a cheaper per-TB archive tier wins even with its minimum.

2. Backblaze B2: the cheap option with no strings on deletion

Backblaze B2 has no minimum retention period, and Backblaze has been fairly pointed about that in its own comparisons against Wasabi.

Storage is $6.95/TB/month with the first 10 GB free. Egress is free up to three times your stored data each month, then $0.01/GB, and egress to partner CDNs and compute providers including Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net, and Vultr is unlimited and free.

B2 does charge for certain API calls, which is the one thing to check if your workload is request-heavy. But on the specific question of deleting data whenever you want, it is clean.

Use B2 if:

• You want the lowest per-TB price without retention traps.
• You have rolling backups with short retention.
• You serve files through a partner CDN.

Skip it if:

• You need European data residency.
• Your workload makes very high volumes of API calls.

3. Hetzner Object Storage: no minimums, European, cheap

Hetzner Object Storage has no minimum storage duration. Pricing is 6.49 EUR/month excluding VAT including 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of egress, with extra storage at 8.70 EUR/TB-month, extra egress at 1 EUR/TB, and free ingress, internal eu-central traffic, and S3 API calls.

For short-lived data in Europe at volume, that combination is very hard to beat, and it supports versioning.

The usual caveat applies: Hetzner's status page has repeatedly reported degraded Object Storage across locations, with a standing note that high traffic can cause timeouts. For backups and batch workflows that is generally fine. For a user-facing hot path, plan around it.

Use Hetzner if:

• You want cheap European storage with no minimums.
• Your data is short-lived and high-volume.
• Your infrastructure is already at Hetzner.

Skip it if:

• The workload is latency-sensitive.
• You want platform integration.

4. Cloudflare R2 Standard: no minimum, but mind the class

Cloudflare R2 Standard has no minimum storage duration. Storage is $0.015/GB/month with free egress.

The important distinction is the storage class. R2 Infrequent Access has a 30-day minimum, and objects deleted or transitioned before that are still billed for the full 30 days. So R2 belongs on this list only as long as you stay on Standard, which is often the right choice anyway for data you delete quickly.

Operations are the other cost: Class A (uploads, deletes, lists) at $4.50 per million with the first million free monthly, and Class B (reads) at $0.36 per million with the first 10 million free. A write-and-delete-heavy workload generates a lot of Class A operations, so check that number.

Use R2 if:

• You stay on Standard storage.
• Egress is your dominant cost.
• You already use Cloudflare.

Skip it if:

• You planned to use Infrequent Access for short-lived data.
• Your operation counts are high.

5. Scaleway Object Storage: no minimum on Standard

Scaleway Object Storage Standard has no minimum storage duration, and runs around 0.0105 EUR/GB/month with 75 GB of free egress per month, then about 0.008 EUR/GB outside the EU.

As with R2, the exception is the cold tier. Scaleway's Glacier class is designed for archival and is not the right destination for objects you expect to delete soon, so lifecycle rules that tier data down need checking against your actual deletion patterns.

Scaleway is a good fit when you want European storage with versioning, object lock, and lifecycle rules, and you are disciplined about which class short-lived data lands in.

Use Scaleway if:

• You want EU storage with lifecycle tooling.
• You keep short-lived data on Standard.
• You want an established European cloud.

Skip it if:

• You want the simplest possible pricing.
• You want fully free egress.

Which one should you pick?

Conclusion

Minimum retention policies are not a scam, they are how providers make cold storage economics work. The mistake is applying them to warm data, and the mistake Wasabi's model in particular invites is applying a 90-day minimum to a general-purpose bucket.

Before you pick, work out your real deletion pattern. If objects live for years, minimums are irrelevant and you should optimise purely for per-TB price. If objects live for days or weeks, a provider with no minimum can easily be cheaper than one advertising a lower rate.

For workloads that write and delete constantly, Sliplane Object Storage charges 5 EUR per 250 GB based on your average storage across the month, with no retention minimum, no request fees, and no egress fees.