Introducing New Subscription Tiers for MinIO AIStor: Free, Enterprise Lite, and Enterprise

At MinIO, we're committed to delivering the world's fastest, most scalable object store — purpose-built for everything from everyday applications to the largest AI workloads. Today, we're excited to announce two new subscription tiers for MinIO AIStor: Free and Enterprise Lite, joining our existing Enterprise subscription.

These new tiers make high-performance, S3-compatible object storage more accessible than ever, whether you're running a small project, building modern data lakes, archiving massive datasets, or powering exabyte-scale AI infrastructure. The options scale seamlessly with your needs while preserving the performance, reliability, and feature completeness that have made MinIO the preferred object store for thousands of organizations worldwide.

MinIO AIStor remains the software-defined high-performance object store that delivers unmatched throughput, horizontal scalability, full S3 compatibility, and native support for open table formats such as Apache Iceberg — all running efficiently on the hardware of your choice, from edge to core to cloud..

The New AIStor Subscription Tiers

Here's a closer look at the three tiers:

AIStor Free

• Ideal for: Developers, researchers, enthusiasts, small organizations, and anyone comfortable with a standalone deployment who needs a powerful S3-compatible object store for structured and/or unstructured data.
• Key Features:
  • Full-featured, single-node deployment architecture
  • Pack as many drives as your hardware supports into a single node — no artificial capacity limit
  • Built-in erasure coding and bitrot protection against drive failures
  • Community Slack channel and documentation
  • Free of charge

This tier delivers the complete capabilities of MinIO AIStor in standalone mode, making it perfect for prototyping, personal projects, homelabs, research, education, backups, media repositories, or production workloads where distributed high availability isn't required. This license limits any redistribution or resale of the AIStor software.

AIStor Enterprise Lite

• Ideal for: Small teams who can self-support and require all the features of AIStor with capacity requirements below 400 TiB.
• Key Features:
  • Full-featured, horizontally scalable multi-node architecture
  • Lite SUBNET subscription including health diagnostics and security reporting
  • Optional add-on: Enterprise Lite Support with <5 day SLA

Enterprise Lite provides the full distributed power of MinIO AIStor without premium support, ideal for growing teams that need high availability and scale for general-purpose or AI-driven workloads.

Important Note on Scaling: If your deployment exceeds 400 TiB on the Enterprise Lite subscription, you'll be automatically upgraded to the full Enterprise subscription, ensuring you receive premium support as your infrastructure grows.

AIStor Enterprise

• Ideal for: Enterprise deployments requiring unmatched performance, scale, and economics with premium support.
• Key Features:
  • Full-featured, horizontally scalable multi-node architecture
  • Dedicated onboarding process - Hardware validation, software setup & benchmarking
  • Enterprise SUBNET subscription including health diagnostics, security reporting, team governance, and more
  • Proactive, 24/7/365 direct-to-engineer support with <4 hour SLA and Panic Button

Our flagship subscription for mission-critical, large-scale deployments — from cloud-native applications to the world's most demanding AI infrastructures.

Why We're Making This Change

We've listened to our community and customers, who consistently told us they love MinIO AIStor's performance and features but wanted more accessible options for smaller deployments under 400 TiB.

The new Free and Enterprise Lite subscriptions directly address this gap: Free provides an unrestricted single-node option for any scale, while Enterprise Lite delivers full distributed capabilities with self-support up to 400 TiB. These tiers make AIStor available to far more users without compromising the enterprise experience for our largest deployments.

Get Started Today

• Download AIStor Free and start building immediately — no limits, no sign-up required.
• Contact our sales team or visit min.io/pricing to learn more about Enterprise Lite and Enterprise subscriptions, including subscription details.
• Existing customers: Reach out via SUBNET for guidance on transitioning to the new tiers.

We're excited to bring these flexible options to the MinIO community and continue delivering the object store that powers the world's most innovative applications.

Thank you for trusting MinIO AIStor with your data.