What is the cheapest object storage for 1 TB?

For 1 TB stored with 0.5 TB egress, the cheapest priced vendor in the catalog comes in around $3.25/mo. The exact number depends on ops, egress region, and any classA/classB free tier the vendor bundles. Run the live calculator at /tools/object-storage-compare for your inputs.

How does Cloudflare R2 stay free of egress fees?

R2's headline promise is zero egress charges — you pay for storage and classA/classB ops only. That's why it ranks well on the production static assets and large archive workloads where egress would otherwise dominate the bill. The catalog row for R2 reflects this directly: storagePerGbMonth and ops rates, no egressPerGb.

Why is AWS S3 so much more expensive than the alternatives?

AWS S3 standard is priced at scale (multiple regions, multiple storage classes, SLAs, integrations), and its egress rates are the highest in the catalog. The right comparison is the S3-vs-R2 head-to-head page — R2 wins on egress-heavy workloads, S3 wins on ecosystem and SLA. The price spread is the cost of the integration, not bad value per se.

What about Wasabi and Backblaze B2?

Both flat-rate-per-GB vendors charge around $0.005–0.007/GB/month for storage with no egress fees. They win on the large archive workload and lose on the small side-project workload where R2's free tier or Bunny's $0.01/GB wins. Both are 100% S3-compatible; the choice is feature parity vs price.

How do I use this with the head-to-head pair pages?

Every pair page (s3-vs-r2, wasabi-vs-b2, hetzner-vs-ovh, etc.) runs the same engine on the same inputs. The pair verdicts are a focused two-vendor slice of the tables on this page — when the rank table moves, the pair verdicts move with it. Re-check capture dates if a verdict looks stale.

Is this report re-verified every month?

No. The catalog verifiedAt is the freshest capture date across all vendor rows. A code update is not a price re-verification — open the source trail at the bottom of the page to see when each rate was last checked against the vendor pricing page.

Pricing report · 2026-08-21

We priced 27 object-storage vendors so you don't have to

Same workloads, same rules, every vendor. At large scale, the spread between the cheapest vendor and AWS S3 is 43×, and the gap is the cost of multi-region, multi-class, SLA-backed scale.

43×price spread, cheapest vs AWS S3 at large scale

$190.00cheapest large archive month

27S3-compatible vendors priced

Why another object-storage comparison

Most object-storage comparisons are product-feature matrices copied from marketing pages. Almost none of them tell you what a workload will actually cost, because pricing pages are full of per-GB storage rates, per-GB egress rates, per-1k-classA/classB rates, and free-tier carveouts that quietly expire.

We maintain a live comparison tool backed by a catalog of 27 S3-compatible object-storage vendors whose rates are hand-captured from official pricing pages. This report runs all of them through three fixed cost-model workloads and reports USD-normalized monthly estimates, EU region. These are cost-model scenarios, not measured performance benchmarks: no latency, throughput, or availability equivalence was tested. NAS, Borg, and non-S3 products are deliberately excluded from the ranked tables (mixing them invites apples-to-oranges verdicts).

The headline finding

At the production static-assets workload (10 TB stored · 5 TB egress), the priced vendors span $19.30/mo to $2990.00/mo. AWS S3 sits in the upper band at $775.88/mo, while Cloudflare R2 sits in the lower band at $236.25/mo. That's a 154.9× difference at identical stored volume and egress, driven by three patterns that show up across the whole market:

Egress-free (R2, Wasabi, B2, Bunny) bills only for storage + ops, so a 5 TB egress workload costs the same as a 0 TB egress one.
Per-GB egress (AWS S3, OVHcloud, DigitalOcean Spaces) bills separately for storage and egress, and the egress line dominates the bill above 1–2 TB/mo.
Tiered / class-based (Glacier-style vendors) charges a low per-GB storage rate but a retrieval fee on every read, so access patterns matter as much as volume.

At side-project scale the spread is more compressed (230.5×) because egress volume is small. At large scale the spread widens (43.2×) and AWS S3's egress line dominates the bill.

The numbers

Side-project backup

1 TB stored · 0.5 TB egress/mo · 2 M PUT · 50 M GET · EU

#	Vendor	Est. monthly cost
1	Hetzner Storage Box → head-to-head	€3.25
2	iDrive e2 → head-to-head	$6.00
3	B2 Cloud Storage → head-to-head	$6.95
4	Hetzner Object Storage → head-to-head	€6.49
5	Synology C2 OneStorage → head-to-head	$7.99
6	Wasabi Hot Storage → head-to-head	$7.99
7	OVHcloud Object Storage (Standard) → head-to-head	$8.11
8	Telnyx Cloud Storage → head-to-head	$9.14

See this vendor head-to-head: AWS S3 vs Cloudflare R2·Wasabi vs Backblaze B2·AWS S3 vs Backblaze B2·Cloudflare R2 vs Wasabi·Hetzner vs OVHcloud Object Storage·DigitalOcean Spaces vs Vultr Object Storage·Hetzner vs AWS S3·OVHcloud vs AWS S3·Hetzner Storage Box vs Backblaze B2·OVHcloud Standard vs Cloudflare R2.

Production static assets

10 TB stored · 5 TB egress/mo · 5 M PUT · 200 M GET · EU

#	Vendor	Est. monthly cost
1	Hetzner Storage Box → head-to-head	€19.30
2	MEGA S4 Object Storage → head-to-head	€33.41
3	iDrive e2 → head-to-head	$60.00
4	B2 Cloud Storage → head-to-head	$69.50
5	Telnyx Cloud Storage → head-to-head	$71.90
6	Hetzner Object Storage → head-to-head	€66.83
7	Synology C2 OneStorage → head-to-head	$79.90
8	Wasabi Hot Storage → head-to-head	$79.90

Large archive / data lake

100 TB stored · 20 TB egress/mo · 10 M PUT · 500 M GET · EU

#	Vendor	Est. monthly cost
1	Hetzner Storage Box → head-to-head	€190.00
2	MEGA S4 Object Storage → head-to-head	€270.11
3	iDrive e2 → head-to-head	$600.00
4	Telnyx Cloud Storage → head-to-head	$639.00
5	B2 Cloud Storage → head-to-head	$695.00
6	Hetzner Object Storage → head-to-head	€645.23
7	Synology C2 OneStorage → head-to-head	$799.00
8	Wasabi Hot Storage → head-to-head	$799.00

Method & honesty notes

Rates captured from official pricing pages and public APIs; capture date recorded per vendor row.
EUR-denominated vendors are converted at the tool's fixed FX rate (USD-normalized for cross-region comparison).
Region filter: every workload uses EU to keep the providers comparable. US-region and global providers appear in the live tool.
Vendors that bill by quote rather than per-GB (e.g. quote-only platforms) are excluded from the ranked tables, not artificially forced onto the chart.
Originally published 2026-08-21; calculations use the catalog bundled with the current build, whose full-verification date is 2026-09-01. This is not an immutable archive of August prices. A code or prose update is not a new price verification. Consult the capture dates and provider sources below; neither this page nor the live tool guarantees today's quote.

Source trail and freshness

These links are the catalog's recorded pricing sources, not proof that every rate was rechecked today. Capture dates can be older than the catalog-wide date. Open the live /tools/object-storage-compare tool for the freshest data.

Bunny Storage — $0.01/GB/mo; EU, US, Asia, SA.
R2 — $0.015/GB/mo; automatic.
B2 Cloud Storage — $0.00695/GB/mo; US-West, EU.
Wasabi Hot Storage — $0.00799/GB/mo; US, EU, AP.
Storj — $0.007/GB/mo; global.
Hetzner Object Storage — $0.00626/GB/mo; EU.
Hetzner Storage Box — $0.0032/GB/mo; EU.
Scaleway Object Storage — $0.01606/GB/mo; EU.
iDrive e2 — $0.006/GB/mo; US, EU, AP.
Vultr Object Storage — $0.018/GB/mo; US, EU, AP.
OVHcloud Object Storage (Standard) — $0.0081103/GB/mo; EU, US.
Oracle Object Storage — $0.0255/GB/mo; US, EU, AP.

FAQ

What is the cheapest object storage for 1 TB?: For 1 TB stored with 0.5 TB egress, the cheapest priced vendor in the catalog comes in around $3.25/mo. The exact number depends on ops, egress region, and any classA/classB free tier the vendor bundles. Run the live calculator at /tools/object-storage-compare for your inputs.
How does Cloudflare R2 stay free of egress fees?: R2's headline promise is zero egress charges — you pay for storage and classA/classB ops only. That's why it ranks well on the production static assets and large archive workloads where egress would otherwise dominate the bill. The catalog row for R2 reflects this directly: storagePerGbMonth and ops rates, no egressPerGb.
Why is AWS S3 so much more expensive than the alternatives?: AWS S3 standard is priced at scale (multiple regions, multiple storage classes, SLAs, integrations), and its egress rates are the highest in the catalog. The right comparison is the S3-vs-R2 head-to-head page — R2 wins on egress-heavy workloads, S3 wins on ecosystem and SLA. The price spread is the cost of the integration, not bad value per se.
What about Wasabi and Backblaze B2?: Both flat-rate-per-GB vendors charge around $0.005–0.007/GB/month for storage with no egress fees. They win on the large archive workload and lose on the small side-project workload where R2's free tier or Bunny's $0.01/GB wins. Both are 100% S3-compatible; the choice is feature parity vs price.
How do I use this with the head-to-head pair pages?: Every pair page (s3-vs-r2, wasabi-vs-b2, hetzner-vs-ovh, etc.) runs the same engine on the same inputs. The pair verdicts are a focused two-vendor slice of the tables on this page — when the rank table moves, the pair verdicts move with it. Re-check capture dates if a verdict looks stale.
Is this report re-verified every month?: No. The catalog verifiedAt is the freshest capture date across all vendor rows. A code update is not a price re-verification — open the source trail at the bottom of the page to see when each rate was last checked against the vendor pricing page.