Self-hosted S3 after MinIO: lightweight alternatives for 2026

On April 25, 2026, the minio/minio GitHub repository was archived . The Reddit and Hacker News reactions framed it as the death of MinIO. That framing is wrong in a useful way. MinIO the company is not dead. It has $126M in funding, an enterprise product, and paying customers. What ended on April 25 was the public head-stone on something that had already been buried over the previous eleven months: the practical use of MinIO as a free, self-hosted, S3-compatible object store. The archive is the