Head-to-Head Comparison
Hetzner Storage Box vs AWS S3 Pricing (2026)
These are different products with different bills. The Storage Box sells fixed tiers over Native BorgBackup, WebDAV, SFTP, Samba/CIFS, rsync snapshots, from $3.73/mo, so its capacity is bought rather than metered at $3.73/TB. S3 Standard meters storage at $23.00/TB and outbound traffic at $90.00/TB, charges $5.00 per million Class-A writes, and carries a 5 GB storage and 100 GB egress free tier. At 5 TB stored and 5 TB served the engine prices the Storage Box at $12.13 and S3 Standard at $555.88. The gap is the protocol decision, not a discount: the box wins on price per stored terabyte and loses on S3 API compatibility, so an application that needs presigned URLs has to pay for S3.
Monthly Cost by Workload
Starter / Web App
🏆 Hetzner Storage Box saves ~$55.80/mo on this workload.
Growth / Backup
🏆 Hetzner Storage Box saves ~$471.91/mo on this workload.
Data Lake / Scale
🏆 Hetzner Storage Box saves ~$2393.53/mo on this workload.
Side-by-Side Cost & Feature Matrix
| Feature / Pricing Dimension | Hetzner Storage Box | S3 Standard |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor & Parent | Hetzner | AWS |
| Storage Rate (USD/TB/mo) | $3.73 | $23.00 |
| Internet Egress (USD/TB) | $0.12 | $90.00 |
| Free Egress Policy | None | 0.1 TB / month |
| Write Requests (PUT/LIST per 1M) | $0 (Free) | $5.00 |
| Read Requests (GET/HEAD per 1M) | $0 (Free) | $0.40 |
| S3 API Compatibility | ✗ Proprietary / SDK Only | ✓ Standard S3 API |
| Durability | 99.999999999% (11 9s RAID/ZFS) | 99.999999999% (11 9s) |
| Availability SLA | 99.9% | 99.9% |
| Object Lock (WORM) | ✗ Not offered | ✓ Object Lock |
| Versioning | ✓ Supported | ✓ Supported |
| Sovereignty & Jurisdiction | 100% EU Sovereign (Germany & Finland) | US Cloud Act (Global regions) |
| Minimum Commitment | $3.73/mo (BX11 1 TB) | None; 5 GB free tier (12 months) |
| Datacenter Regions | EU | US, EU, AP, SA |
Cost profile: where each provider wins
What Hetzner Storage Box is good for
- ✓ Cheapest published tier $3.73/mo, with a flat rate up to 20 TB
- ✓ Native Native BorgBackup, WebDAV, SFTP, Samba/CIFS, rsync snapshots access, so Borg, Restic and rsync backups work with no S3 client
- ✓ Outbound traffic at $0.12/TB, far below S3 Standard's $90.00/TB
Constraints to plan around:
- ! Not an S3 endpoint: an application expecting the REST API, presigned URLs or Object Lock cannot use it unchanged
- ! Capacity is bought in fixed tiers, so the bill steps up rather than scaling per gigabyte
- ! S3 compatibility, if needed, comes from a separate row in the catalog with its own pricing
What S3 Standard is good for
- ✓ The S3 REST API that nearly every SDK, CLI and backup product speaks natively
- ✓ A 5 GB storage and 100 GB egress free tier with no subscription to start
- ✓ Region choice across the AWS global footprint, with lifecycle tiering into Glacier
Constraints to plan around:
- ! Egress at $90.00/TB is the line that decides the comparison once a workload serves data
- ! Class-A writes bill $5.00 per million, which a backup rotation touching many small objects accumulates
Keep going with these two providers
Rate card, reference bill and the questions this comparison cannot fit.
Vendor guide S3 Standard: rates, billing rules and regions →Rate card, reference bill and the questions this comparison cannot fit.
Calculator Rank all 28 providers for your workload →Change the stored and egress volumes and the whole table re-prices.
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