Chapter 1 of 6 · 2 min
Does Amazon S3 charge for downloads?
Yes. $83 to download a terabyte, the price of dinner for two, against $23.55 a month to keep it. This is the half of the bill most people never price.
Storing a file is rent. Downloading it, which the bill calls data transfer out, is the moving truck, and the truck is billed by the box: $0.09 for every gigabyte that leaves Amazon for a laptop, a phone or a customer, after the first 100 GB each month.
What one download costs
- $0
- 100 GB, a phone-full, because the first 100 GB out each month is free
- $83once
- 1 TB, 250,000 photos, more than three months of its rent
- $890once
- 10 TB, a whole office archive, more than three years of rent for 100 GB
Files that stay inside Amazon, moving between its own services, travel free. So the bill depends less on how much you keep and more on how often people open things. A team that downloads files all day pays for the truck every day.
Two companies with the same shelf space can have bills ten times apart. One of them opens files all day.
There is a way to open a file without hauling the whole thing out, and lesson 4 gets to it. First, the trips that cost nothing.
Prices are for US East, October 2026. How to read the S3 lines on your AWS bill has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 2 OF 6Which transfers are free?Four kinds cost nothing. One of them can halve a public download bill.S3 Savings reads three months of your real S3 bill and shows which of these answers apply to your buckets. Free, read-only, no card.