Chapter 3 of 6 · 2 min
How much does 1 TB cost in Amazon S3 per month?
$23.55 a month. That is a quarter of a million phone photos, or a million Word documents, for the price of one streaming subscription.
The lesson 2 film is on chapter 1.
A terabyte is a serious amount of files: a decade of scanned paperwork for a mid-sized office, or 400 hours of phone video. On the normal shelf it costs $23.55 a month, which is what most people pay for one streaming service.
The same terabyte on each shelf
- $23.55a month
- S3 Standard, the normal shelf
- $12.80a month
- Standard-IA, the rarely-opened shelf, 30-day minimum
- $4.10a month
- Glacier Instant Retrieval, the archive shelf that still opens instantly, 90-day minimum
- $1.01a month
- Glacier Deep Archive, the deep archive, six-month minimum, hours to get a file back
Ten terabytes cost ten times as much, $235.52. The rate drops a little once you pass fifty terabytes, so volume helps, but not much.
Download the whole terabyte once and you pay $83 in a single day. That is three and a half months of rent.
Those numbers assume the files sit still. Most files do not. Lesson 3 is about that half of the bill.
Prices are for US East, October 2026. A worked monthly bill for a 2 TB archive has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 4 OF 6Do empty buckets cost money?No. But very few empty buckets are actually empty.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.