S3 Pricing Comparison: S3 vs R2 vs Wasabi vs Backblaze B2

Compare S3, R2, Wasabi, and Backblaze B2 storage pricing by GB-month and egress.

Cloud storage pricing has two line items that trade off against each other in ways a single headline number hides: what you pay to store data every month, and what you pay when someone downloads it. This comparison runs both your storage volume and expected monthly egress against four providers' actual published rate structures, because the cheapest storage rate and the cheapest total monthly bill are frequently not the same provider.

How to compare S3, R2, Wasabi and B2 costs

Enter how much data you keep stored, in GB-months — 1,000 means one terabyte held for the whole month.
Enter the gigabytes you expect to be downloaded each month; zero is accepted for backup or archive data nobody reads.
Read the ranked table, which splits each provider's bill into storage cost, egress cost and monthly total and highlights the cheapest row.
Try a higher egress figure to see where the ranking flips, and copy the page address to keep the inputs you settled on.

Current rates behind the comparison

These rates were checked against each provider's published pricing page on 2026-08-29 and cover standard, frequently accessed storage at list price.
AWS S3 Standard: $0.023 per GB-month to store, plus $0.09/GB of egress beyond the 100 GB AWS includes free each month. The comparison applies that $0.09 flat; AWS's real rate steps down past 10 TB, which the Bandwidth Egress Calculator models tier by tier.
Cloudflare R2: $0.015 per GB-month, with $0 egress at any volume.
Wasabi: $7.99 per TB-month ($0.00799 per GB), raised from $6.99 on July 1, 2026, with no separate egress line as long as your usage stays within Wasabi's fair-use policy.
Backblaze B2: $6.95 per TB-month ($0.00695 per GB), raised from $6.00, with $0.01/GB egress charged only after a free allowance of three times your average stored data.
With the defaults of 1,000 GB stored and 500 GB downloaded, the monthly totals are $6.95 for B2, $7.99 for Wasabi, $15.00 for R2 and $59.00 for S3.

Storage-per-gigabyte and egress-per-gigabyte are two separate bills

AWS S3 Standard charges roughly $0.023 per gigabyte-month for storage and, separately, roughly $0.09 per gigabyte for data downloaded past a perpetual 100GB/month free allowance. Backblaze B2 charges about $0.00695 per gigabyte-month for storage — noticeably cheaper than S3 — plus about $0.01 per gigabyte in egress once you exceed a free allowance equal to three times your average monthly stored volume.

A workload that stores a lot of data but rarely downloads it will favor whichever provider has the cheapest storage rate; a workload that stores modestly but serves heavy download traffic needs the egress side of the comparison far more than the storage side.

R2 and Wasabi both compete on eliminating the egress line entirely

Cloudflare R2 charges about $0.015 per gigabyte-month for storage and, as a deliberate differentiator against S3-compatible competitors, charges nothing at all for egress bandwidth, regardless of volume — that zero isn't a promotional rate, it's R2's permanent pricing structure.

Wasabi's flat $7.99-per-terabyte-month pricing (about $0.00799 per gigabyte-month) similarly carries no separate egress line item, but that's modeled here with an explicit caveat rather than a flat guarantee: Wasabi's terms include a fair-use and anti-hotlinking policy that can trigger overage charges if egress runs far past what's reasonable for the amount of data you actually have stored.

How the comparison ranks providers

Each provider's total monthly cost is storage cost plus egress cost at the volumes you enter, computed from each provider's own free-allowance rules — R2's egress is forced to zero in every case, B2's free allowance scales with your stored volume, and S3's free allowance is a fixed 100GB regardless of how much you store.

A storage volume that is zero, negative or non-numeric is rejected before any comparison runs, and so is a negative egress figure. Egress of exactly zero is accepted, because a backup that is never downloaded is a real workload rather than an empty field.

API request and minimum-duration fees

The comparison prices stored gigabytes and downloaded gigabytes only. It leaves out per-request charges: S3 bills PUT, GET and LIST requests, and R2 splits its operations into Class A (writes and listings) and Class B (reads), each with its own rate and free monthly quota — current figures are on each provider's pricing page. For a few thousand large files these fees amount to pennies; for millions of small objects, frequent listings or chatty backup software, they can outgrow the storage bill.

Minimum storage duration isn't modeled either. Wasabi's documentation describes a 90-day minimum on its pay-as-you-go plan: delete an object after 15 days and the remaining 75 are still billed as timed deleted storage. If your data turns over quickly, as with short-retention backups or scratch space, read Wasabi's pricing FAQ before relying on the $7.99/TB figure.

Which provider fits your workload

Backups and archives written once and rarely read: the per-terabyte rate decides it, which in this table means B2 at $6.95/TB and then Wasabi at $7.99/TB — though frequent pruning makes Wasabi's minimum-duration rule worth checking.
Public media, downloads and user uploads served to the internet: egress dominates, so R2's zero egress or Wasabi's fair-use model pulls ahead of S3 once traffic passes S3's free 100 GB.
Pipelines already running on AWS: keeping data in S3 beside EC2, Lambda or Athena avoids cross-cloud transfer altogether; AWS generally doesn't bill S3 transfer to services in the same region, but confirm that on the S3 pricing page for your region.
Hotlinked or viral files whose downloads far exceed stored volume: Wasabi's fair-use terms can add overage charges and B2's allowance runs out, so at 1,000 GB stored and 5,000 GB downloaded B2 rises to $26.95 while R2 stays at $15.00.

What list prices don't cover

Enterprise-negotiated discounts, committed-use contracts, and volume-based custom pricing all sit below what these list rates show, and none of that is modeled here.
Retrieval fees and early-deletion rules for infrequent-access and archive storage classes aren't included, since the comparison covers standard, frequently accessed tiers only; request fees are explained in their own section above.
Wasabi's no-separate-egress pricing is subject to its own fair-use terms, not a blanket promise for every account and usage pattern — read the current terms before assuming zero egress cost for a high-egress workload.
Prices are current as of a specific date and every provider revises pricing periodically; check each provider's live pricing page before committing budget based on this comparison.

Questions people ask about Cloud Storage Price Comparison

Is Cloudflare R2 cheaper than Amazon S3?: In this model, yes, for any inputs: R2 stores data at $0.015 per GB-month against S3's $0.023 and charges nothing for egress, while S3 bills $0.09/GB past 100 GB. R2 never ranks first here, though, because Wasabi has a lower storage rate and also no egress line, subject to its fair-use policy.
Does Wasabi have a minimum storage duration?: Wasabi's own documentation describes a 90-day minimum on pay-as-you-go storage, billing deleted objects for whatever remains of that window. This comparison does not add the charge, so check Wasabi's pricing FAQ if your data is deleted or replaced more often than every three months.
Are API request fees included in this comparison?: No. Only storage and egress are priced. Request charges such as S3's PUT and GET fees or R2's Class A and Class B operations are left out, and they matter for workloads with millions of small objects, so look them up on each provider's pricing page.
Is Wasabi's egress really always free?: Wasabi advertises no separate egress line item under its standard pay-as-you-go plan, but that's subject to a fair-use and anti-hotlinking policy that can trigger overage charges if your egress volume runs far beyond what's reasonable for your stored data. This comparison treats it as $0 with that caveat, not as an unconditional guarantee.
How was Backblaze B2's free egress allowance calculated?: B2's published policy grants free egress up to roughly three times your average monthly stored data volume, and that's the allowance this comparison applies before charging the roughly $0.01-per-gigabyte overage rate — it scales with how much you store, unlike S3's fixed 100GB/month allowance.
Does this reflect enterprise or negotiated pricing?: No. Every figure is each provider's published list price for standard, non-enterprise-discounted volumes as of the date this comparison was last verified. Large-volume customers frequently negotiate lower rates directly with a provider, so treat this as a starting point for list pricing, not a ceiling on what's actually achievable.

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Content reviewed 2026-09-27.