Chapter 5 of 6 · 2 min
What is cheaper than Amazon S3?
SHORT ANSWER
Cloudflare R2 at $15.36 a terabyte and Backblaze B2 at $6.95, against $23.55 on S3. Both also charge little or nothing for downloads, which is where the real gap is.
The lesson 3 film is on chapter 1.
Keep 1 TB and download it once, in a month
- $115.71on Amazon S3
- $23.55 rent plus $83 for the download, 250,000 photos out the door once
- $15.36on Cloudflare R2
- rent only; downloads are free
- $7.12on Backblaze B2
- rent only; downloads free up to three times what you store
Why most teams stay anyway
- Moving out costs one last truck: $83 for every terabyte you take elsewhere.
- Files that stay inside Amazon travel free, so if the rest of your systems live there, the download charge rarely applies.
- The cheaper option inside S3 is usually a cheaper shelf: files nobody opens cost a tenth as much on the archive shelves.
For files served to the public on the internet, though, the rivals win by a mile, and the pricing guide has the full table.
Prices are for US East, October 2026. S3 vs Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, Google Cloud Storage and Azure has every rate and the steps.
NEXT · CHAPTER 6 OF 6Where is the money going in my bucket?Three free reports, and the one question none of them answer.What is my bucket costing me?
See what my buckets cost 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.