Cheapest object storage in 2026: the real monthly cost per terabyte

The per-GB price is the wrong number

Every object storage vendor leads with a storage rate per gigabyte per month, and every one of those rates is true and none of them decides the bill. What decides the bill is egress: the traffic you send back out. At the workload most teams actually run, egress costs more than storage, often several times more, and it is the only line that moves when you change the shape of your data. A vendor at $23.00 per TB per month with $90.00 per TB of egress is not the most expensive storage on this list. It is the fourth cheapest. Any ranking built on the headline rate alone will put the wrong provider at the top, which is why the number the market quotes is the wrong number.

The workload these numbers describe

Every figure below is one workload, stated so you can argue with it: 5 TB stored, 3 TB of egress per month, EU region, 2 million PUT and LIST operations per month, 50 million GET and HEAD operations per month. The 5 TB and 3 TB are the defaults in the comparison tool, which computes the same ranking and lets you change every one of those inputs. Storage and egress are separated so you can see which line is doing the damage. Totals are normalised to USD at the fixed rate the tool uses, so the rows are comparable; the native currency each vendor bills in is still recorded in the catalog behind each row.

The board

The top row is a backup box, not an object store. That single fact is the most useful thing on this board, so read it before anything else. Hetzner's Storage Box is a managed NAS and file storage: SFTP, BorgBackup, WebDAV, Samba and rsync on fixed capacity tiers, at $11.89 a month for 5 TB with egress at $0.0001 per GB. It is the cheapest thing here by a wide margin and it is not an object store. It has no S3 API, so an application that talks S3 cannot talk to it, and it has a 99.9% SLA against 99.99% for the durable object stores near the top. If your workload is backups, that is exactly the right product. If it is an application reading and writing objects, it is not a candidate at all, however good the price.

The cheapest object store is MEGA S4, and here is the S4 cost per terabyte

Excluding the backup box, the cheapest S3-compatible object store on this board is MEGA S4 at $23.62 a month for the same 5 TB and 3 TB. The S4 number people ask for is $2.63 per TB per month for storage. The structure behind it matters more than the rate. Pro Flexi is a EUR 15.00 monthly base that includes 3 TB of storage and 3 TB of transfer, additional storage is billed at the captured rate of EUR 2.63 per TB, and egress is free up to five times the stored amount each month. At 5 TB stored that allowance is 15 TB of free egress, which is why the egress column reads $0.00 and why S4 lands second overall despite not having the lowest headline rate on the board. One honest footnote: MEGA's own page carries a EUR 2.50 per TB marketing figure, and the rate in our catalog is the EUR 2.63 captured from the plan page, so the number you are quoted and the number you are billed can differ by a few per cent. The base plan is EUR 15.00 a month whether you use one gigabyte of the included 3 TB or all of it, which is the second reason the headline rate understates the cost at small volumes.

Three traps in this table

• A low storage rate with metered egress is not cheap storage. S3 Standard is the third cheapest storage rate on this board at $0.023 per GB per month, and it is the fourth most expensive total, at $405.88 a month, because $261.00 of that is egress at $0.09 per GB. The same three terabytes leaving Wasabi, OVHcloud, Cloudflare R2, Telnyx or Bunny cost nothing at all.
• Free egress changes the ranking rather than trimming it. Five providers on this board bill egress at zero: Wasabi, OVHcloud, Cloudflare R2, Telnyx, Bunny and Contabo, with Hetzner including 1 TB and Backblaze allowing the first three times your stored amount. Backblaze B2, at $34.75, is the clearest case: $0.00695 per GB per month, $0.01 per GB egress, and a $0.00 egress line anyway, because 3 TB of egress sits inside the 3x allowance on 5 TB of storage.
• Base plans hide the small-volume bill. Hetzner Object Storage is EUR 6.49 a month for 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of traffic, then EUR 6.26 per TB of extra storage and EUR 1.00 per TB of extra egress. Cloudflare R2 is $15.00 per TB per month with free egress but a high per-million Class A write fee, so it wins on egress-heavy, write-light workloads and loses on the reverse. Storage Box, MEGA S4, Linode, Vultr and DigitalOcean all carry a base commitment that is payable whether or not you fill it.

What changes the answer

The workload decides the winner, and the workload is not a constant. A backup target sends very little traffic back out, so egress barely matters and the cheapest durable store wins, which is why the durable 11-nines providers sit near the top once you discount the Storage Box for not speaking S3. A media library sends most of what it stores back out, so egress dominates and free-egress providers move to the front. An archive that is written once and read rarely is a different product from a hot bucket, and the hourly storage rate of a retrieval class is not comparable to the monthly rate of a hot class. The ranking above holds for 5 TB stored and 3 TB out. Change either number in the tool and the order changes, sometimes by a factor of five. The single most useful thing to do before choosing is put your real numbers in, because the gap between the cheapest and the dearest row here is $11.89 against $990.00, and that gap is entirely a function of the workload rather than of the vendors.

All 26 ranked rows were captured from each vendor's own pricing page on 2026-09-01, and each row keeps its own pricingUrl and pricingCapturedAt stamp in the catalog that backs the interactive comparison. The catalog holds a 27th vendor, IONOS, whose storage rate was captured but whose egress price was not, so it is deliberately absent from this board rather than ranked on a half-known cost. The tool computes the same ranking from the same data, so when a vendor changes its price the number in this article moves with the catalog rather than needing to be defended. If you want a second opinion on a specific workload, ask the assistant.