Cloud Storage → Cost Comparison
S3 charges three line items — storage, API ops, egress. R2 charges one: storage, zero egress. At 50 TB the 6-vendor spread is 5×. If your workload is egress-heavy, the cheapest $/GB vendor loses. Model your actual mix.
📐 Workload Parameters
Dial in storage volume, monthly egress, ops rates, lifecycle tiers, and redundancy. Every knob shifts the vendor ranking.
🔄 Lifecycle Tier Distribution
Simulate data distribution across hot/warm/cold/archive tiers. Many vendors charge less for colder tiers but add retrieval fees.
Percentages should sum to 100. Lifecycle distribution affects storage cost only; operation and egress costs use the hot-tier assumption.
Cloud Object Storage Pricing Landscape (2026)
Cloud storage pricing is intentionally complex — each vendor slices costs across storage volume, API operations (Class A/B or PUT/GET), egress bandwidth, and minimum retention periods for cold tiers. The table below summarizes approximate per-GB storage costs by tier across the six major vendors modeled by this calculator.
| Vendor | Hot / Standard | Warm / IA | Cold / Archive | Egress ($/GB) | Notable |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 | $0.023 | $0.0125 | $0.004 | $0.09 | Glacier Deep Archive at $0.00099/GB |
| GCP Cloud Storage | $0.020 | $0.010 | $0.004 | $0.12 | Archive tier at $0.0012/GB |
| Azure Blob | $0.018 | $0.010 | $0.002 | $0.087 | Cool tier has 30-day minimum |
| Cloudflare R2 | $0.015 | — | — | $0.00 | Zero egress fees; single tier |
| Backblaze B2 | $0.006 | — | — | $0.01 | Lowest base storage; 3× free egress |
| Wasabi | $0.00699 | — | — | $0.00 | No egress; 90-day minimum storage |
Why this calculator exists: AWS, GCP, and Azure each have 5–8 storage tiers with different retrieval fees, minimum duration penalties, and regional multipliers. New entrants like Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi disrupt the model with zero-egress or flat-rate pricing. Existing tools like joteo.net only cover 3 fields. Cloud vendor-native calculators only compute their own bill — no cross-vendor comparison. This tool fills that gap.
How to Use This Calculator for Cloud Storage Selection
1. Profile Your Workload
Input your estimated storage volume (in TB), monthly egress traffic (in GB), and API operation counts. If you don't have exact numbers, rough orders of magnitude are sufficient — the tool is designed for comparative analysis, not invoice-precision billing.
2. Adjust Lifecycle Distribution
Most production workloads don't store 100% of data in hot storage. Use the lifecycle sliders to model what percentage lives in each tier. Cold storage is dramatically cheaper per GB but incurs retrieval penalties — the calculator surfaces these trade-offs in the per-vendor breakdown.
3. Compare Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Don't just look at the $/GB storage number. A vendor with slightly higher storage pricing (e.g., Cloudflare R2 at $0.015/GB) can beat AWS S3 on TCO for egress-heavy workloads because R2 charges $0 for egress. This is the kind of cross-dimensional insight this calculator is built to surface.
4. Factor in Minimum Retention
Cold-tier storage at AWS (Glacier) and Azure (Archive) imposes 90-day or 180-day minimum retention periods. If you delete data early, you pay for the full minimum duration. Our calculator flags these constraints in the results.