Chapter 2 of 6 · 2 min
How much does 100 GB cost in Amazon S3?
$2.30 a month. That is about 25,000 phone photos, or 100,000 Word documents, kept for the price of one coffee.
The lesson 2 film is on chapter 1.
Amazon charges for the shelf space your files take up, by the month. A hundred gigabytes on the normal shelf comes to $2.30. Keep the files for half a month and you pay half, because the meter runs by the hour.
What 100 GB looks like
- 25,000 photos from a phone, at about 4 MB each.
- 100,000 Word documents, at about 1 MB each.
- 40 hours of phone video, at about 2.5 GB an hour.
The cheaper shelves
- $2.30a month
- S3 Standard, the normal shelf: files you open any time
- $1.25a month
- Standard-IA, the rarely-opened shelf, with a 30-day minimum stay and a small fee per fetch
- $0.10a month
- Glacier Deep Archive, the deep archive, with a six-month minimum and up to half a day to get a file back
Keeping files is the cheap half. Getting them back out is the half nobody prices.
Downloading those 100 GB once a month costs nothing, because the first 100 GB out of Amazon each month is free. Download them ten times and the bill is about $81, more than three years of rent for the same files.
Prices are for US East, October 2026. What 100 GB to 100 TB costs a month, by shelf has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 3 OF 6What does 1 TB cost a month?$23.55 a month, about one streaming subscription. Until someone opens the files.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.