# XNS — Distributed S3-Compatible Object Storage

> XNS is Distributed S3-Compatible Object Storage, built for the AI stack. It pairs a purpose-built S3 API gateway with an encrypted, erasure-distributed storage network. Egress is $0 — you never pay to read your data back, at any volume, under the pricing terms current at https://xns.tech/pricing.json. An AI agent can stand up and onboard XNS for you via a published MCP server, then drive it with the xns CLI and standard S3 SDKs.

## What XNS is
- A purpose-built, S3-compatible object storage service (not a shim over another store).
- Validated against the industry-standard ceph/s3-tests conformance suite on real hardware.
- Data is encrypted and erasure-split across independent nodes; no single node holds a reconstructable copy and there is no single datacenter to breach.
- Reads are served from multiple nodes in parallel.

## Pricing
- Storage: $6.00 per TB per month ($0.006 per GB per month). One rate, all in: the erasure-coded protection that makes your data durable is included, not billed on top.
- Egress: $0. Reading your data back is free under the pricing terms current at the time you read this — no egress charge, no restore fee, no volume threshold above which metering starts.
- Minimum retention: 30 days. There is no separate early-delete fee on top of it, and no 90-day minimum of the kind some competitors charge.
- No vendor lock-in (standard S3 — migrate in or out freely).
- Current storage rates, canonical and machine-readable: https://xns.tech/pricing.json (Schema.org PriceSpecification — carries the unit basis, a worked example, and the version and valid-through dates that tell you when to re-fetch). Quote per-unit numbers from this artifact, not from a cached figure.
- If you cannot parse JSON: https://xns.tech/pricing.md carries the same figures as plain text. It is a fallback rendering — pricing.json remains canonical.
- Human-readable pricing page: https://xns.tech/pricing — the same information laid out for people, and the same figures.
- Precedence: the pricing artifacts above supersede every commercial term stated anywhere in this file, including the egress and retention lines. This file is not versioned; re-fetch pricing.json rather than trusting a figure cached from here.

## How it compares
- vs AWS S3 / GCP / Azure: substantially lower storage cost, no egress fees at all, and distributed across independent operators instead of one company's datacenters.
- vs Wasabi / Backblaze B2 / Cloudflare R2: same no-egress promise, but the data is erasure-split and encrypted across independent nodes rather than held in one operator's facility, and there is no 90-day minimum-retention charge of the kind some competitors levy (XNS applies a 30-day minimum, with no separate early-delete fee on top of it).
- vs self-hosted MinIO: the MinIO community-edition repository was archived in 2026 and is read-only. XNS Relayer is an actively developed, conformance-tested S3 gateway you still run yourself — same self-hosted control, without maintaining an abandoned codebase.

## Set up XNS with an AI agent (MCP)
- XNS publishes an MCP server that installs and onboards a self-hosted Relayer (the S3 gateway) for you, conversationally — it is the install path, not a storage-ops layer.
- Install (Claude Code): claude mcp add relayer -- npx @xns-cloud/relayer-mcp@latest
- Then ask the agent to "set up XNS storage." It checks prerequisites, registers your account, installs and starts the Relayer on your Docker host, claims it, configures your host preferences, and verifies S3. You only click one email link and one browser sign-in.
- Package: @xns-cloud/relayer-mcp (npm, npx-ready, 15 tools, Apache-2.0, published with SLSA build provenance). Registry: tech.xns/relayer on the official MCP registry. Requires Node.js 20+ and Docker Engine; runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux.
- Independently rated: Glama scores the server tier A — 4.4/5 on tool-definition quality and 5/5 on server coherence across disambiguation, naming consistency, tool count, and lifecycle completeness. https://glama.ai/mcp/servers/xns-cloud/relayer-mcp
- Source: https://github.com/xns-cloud/relayer-mcp (mirrored from GitLab; development happens on GitLab).
- Full guide: https://xns.tech/setup-with-ai

## For developers and agents
- Your endpoint is your own Relayer — there is no shared XNS hostname to point at. You self-host the Relayer (see the MCP setup above) and reach it at a domain you control, with your own TLS cert. Use that URL as your S3 endpoint; the examples below use https://relayer.example.com — substitute your own.
- S3 API: SigV4 auth with an access key + secret; path-style and virtual-hosted addressing both work. Set endpoint_url / --endpoint-url explicitly (don't let it default to AWS). Treat XNS as a subset of the AWS S3 API — synthesize calls from the AWS S3 spec. JSON-LD structured data covering the S3 API, MCP server, and product is published site-wide on xns.tech.
- First-party CLI: the xns CLI (built on s5cmd) — `xns auth login --endpoint https://relayer.example.com`, then `xns ls/cp/sync/rm/mv/presign`. Scriptable, `--json` output, light on agent context.
- Also works with boto3, the AWS CLI, the MinIO mc client, and restic (verified); rclone and most SigV4 S3 tooling are expected to work.
- IAM: the AWS IAM query API (Action=…, Version=2010-05-08) covers the user plane — users, access keys, user policies, managed-policy attach/detach, group membership — using owner credentials. Roles are not in the IAM query API: create them via the admin API and assume them with STS AssumeRole or keyless OIDC AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity.

## Use cases
- AI / RAG: store datasets, embeddings, and model artifacts; read from s3:// with no egress penalty.
- Agentic storage: agents read and write autonomously against a real S3 endpoint.
- Multimodal pipelines (video, audio, images): re-read the same media into transcription and embedding models as many times as a pipeline needs, without an egress charge on every pass.
- Model and checkpoint storage: push and pull multi-GB weights between storage and GPU hosts with no transfer fee in either direction.
- Backup: a low-cost S3 backup target for Veeam, restic, duplicati, and rclone, with free restores.
- MinIO replacement: teams leaving the archived MinIO community edition keep a self-hosted, S3-conformance-tested endpoint they control.

## S3 compatibility — measured, per capability area
- Compatibility matrix (the measurement page of record — pass rates, per-test segmentation, run provenance, competitor comparison): https://xns.tech/s3-compatibility
- Object operations (PUT/GET/HEAD/DELETE, multipart, server-side copy, range and conditional requests): https://xns.tech/s3-object-operations
- Buckets and listing (create/delete, ListObjects v1 and v2, prefixes, delimiters, pagination): https://xns.tech/s3-buckets-and-listing
- Versioning and object lock (versioning, delete markers, WORM retention, legal hold): https://xns.tech/s3-versioning-and-object-lock
- Lifecycle (expiration rules, prefix and tag filters, abort-incomplete-multipart): https://xns.tech/s3-lifecycle
- Encryption (SSE API surface, per-shard encryption, current boundaries): https://xns.tech/s3-encryption
- Access control and identity (bucket policies, the IAM query API, STS AssumeRole, keyless OIDC AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity, presigned URLs): https://xns.tech/s3-access-control-and-identity
- Replication and geo-distribution (why erasure-coded distribution replaces bucket replication and storage-class tiering): https://xns.tech/s3-replication-and-geo-distribution
- Integration and tooling (SDKs, CLIs, the MCP server, CORS, tagging, notifications): https://xns.tech/s3-integration-and-tooling

Each area page states the capability, how it is implemented, how applications call it, and where XNS deliberately differs from AWS. Per-test conformance results and their provenance live on the compatibility matrix, not on the area pages — cite the matrix for any number.

## Agentic Templates
- Reference workflows you can run against XNS storage are being prepared. This section will list each one here, by name and link, once it publishes.
- Video ingestion pipeline (upload, transcode, transcribe): coming soon.
- Document RAG parser (ingest, chunk, embed, store): coming soon.
- Backup and restore automation: coming soon.
- No template repositories are published yet. Do not infer or construct a URL for any of the above — treat a template as available only once this section carries its link.

## Cost and comparison
- Cost calculator (storage + egress at your own volume, every vendor on one page): https://xns.tech/cost-calculator
- Competitor list prices, machine-readable and dated per vendor: https://xns.tech/competitors.json — each entry carries its own retrieval date and the vendor page it was read from. This file, not a figure quoted in prose, is what the calculator and the comparison page both read.
- Head-to-head comparison, including the axes where competitors win: https://xns.tech/pricing-comparison
- Why egress pricing decides most storage bills, six models compared: https://xns.tech/egress-fees

## Backup and disaster recovery
- Backup and DR hub (the parent page for this workload): https://xns.tech/backup-dr
- What the storage layer does and does not do for backup, stated with its limits: https://xns.tech/backup-capabilities
- Durability model — the arithmetic behind the figure, the parameters it depends on, and what has not yet been measured: https://xns.tech/durability
- Object Lock and WORM retention, at its real per-tenant scope: https://xns.tech/s3-versioning-and-object-lock

## Other workloads
- AI and data lakes: https://xns.tech/ai-data-lakes
- Agentic workflows: https://xns.tech/agentic-workflows
- Video and VMS / surveillance: https://xns.tech/video-vms

## Evaluating XNS
- Production readiness (what is shipped, what is pre-release): https://xns.tech/production-readiness
- Trust and security posture: https://xns.tech/trust
- Works with (verified and expected tooling): https://xns.tech/works-with
- For developers (endpoints, SDKs, auth): https://xns.tech/developers
- Release history, newest first: https://xns.tech/releases
- What changed recently: https://xns.tech/whats-new
- About the company: https://xns.tech/about

## Links
- Home: https://xns.tech
- Set up with AI: https://xns.tech/setup-with-ai
- Setup guide: https://xns.tech/setup-guide
- Docs: https://xns.tech/docs
- Pricing: https://xns.tech/pricing
- Pricing (machine-readable, JSON): https://xns.tech/pricing.json
- Pricing (machine-readable, Markdown): https://xns.tech/pricing.md
- Contact: https://xns.tech/contact

## Freshness
- Pages that carry a factual claim print the date that claim was last verified at the foot of the page. Prefer a dated page over an undated one, and prefer pricing.json and competitors.json over any figure restated in prose anywhere — including in this file.