Which cloud storage provider is cheapest for my workload?

It depends on the mix of storage, operations, and egress — S3 charges for all three, while R2 has zero egress, and at 50 TB the spread across six vendors can exceed 5×. This calculator models your actual workload across all dimensions and lifecycle tiers (Standard → Infrequent → Archive) to produce a side-by-side monthly TCO, so the choice is based on your profile, not vendor marketing.

Why does egress dominate cloud storage cost?

Egress — data transferred out of the provider — is where margins are made, and it is charged separately from storage. A read-heavy workload can pay more in egress than in storage. The calculator shows the egress component explicitly per vendor, which is why a zero-egress provider like R2 often wins for high-read workloads despite similar storage pricing.

How should I set lifecycle tiers for my object storage?

Profile your data by access frequency: hot data stays in Standard, rarely-accessed data moves to Infrequent Access, and archival data goes to Glacier-style tiers. The calculator lets you set the tier distribution and shows how the 3-year TCO changes, including the transition and retrieval costs that naive comparisons forget.

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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.

Total Storage Volume (TB)

Monthly Egress Traffic (GB)

Monthly Write Operations (PUT/POST, thousands)

Monthly Read Operations (GET/HEAD, thousands)

Redundancy Strategy

Primary Region

📊 Monthly Cost Comparison — All Vendors

Vendor / Tier	Storage Cost	API Ops Cost	Egress Cost	Total / Month	Annual Estimate

🔄 Lifecycle Tier Distribution

Simulate data distribution across hot/warm/cold/archive tiers. Many vendors charge less for colder tiers but add retrieval fees.

Hot Tier % (Frequent Access)

Warm Tier % (Infrequent Access)

Cold Tier % (Archive / Glacier)

Deep Archive % (Compliance / Legal Hold)

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.

Pricing Basis, Sources & Assumptions

Every rate on this page is a published vendor list price — no negotiated discounts, private pricing, or credit offsets. Totals are in USD and exclude tax. Rates were last checked against the sources below on 2026-09-23.

Pricing input	Basis used on this page
Region	us-east-1 (N. Virginia) for AWS. Each provider row in the comparison table uses that provider's own published US list price, before any regional multiplier.
Currency	USD — on-demand list price, tax excluded
Last checked	2026-09-23 — The AWS tier rates used in the comparison ($0.023 / $0.0125 / $0.004 / $0.09) were re-checked on this date; competitor rows are carried from the linked pages.

Modelling assumptions

Storage is billed per GB-month by access tier. AWS us-east-1 list prices used here: S3 Standard $0.023, Standard-IA $0.0125, Glacier Instant Retrieval $0.004; EBS gp3 $0.08 for block storage.
Requests are billed per 1,000 operations: PUT/COPY/POST $0.005, GET/SELECT $0.0004.
Objects smaller than 128 KB are billed as 128 KB in the Infrequent Access and Glacier classes, which is why average object size is an input rather than a footnote.
Minimum storage durations (30 days Standard-IA, 90 days Glacier, 180 days Deep Archive) are enforced, and deleting early is charged for the remainder.
The redundancy multiplier models replication or erasure-coding overhead on stored bytes; the region multiplier scales the vendor's base rate.
Internet egress starts at $0.09/GB with the first 100 GB per month free; providers with free egress (R2, Wasabi) are modelled at $0.00.

What this model excludes

Tax, credits, negotiated or committed-use pricing, and any enterprise discount.
S3 Intelligent-Tiering monitoring ($0.0025 per 1,000 objects per month) and archive retrieval fees beyond the volume entered.
CDN offload, cross-region replication, and per-provider free-egress allowances beyond what each row states.
Request charges for monitoring, inventory, and analytics operations.

Sources

AWS (2026). "Amazon S3 Pricing." Per-class storage rates, request rates, minimum billable object size, and durations. aws.amazon.com
Cloudflare (2026). "R2 Pricing — Zero Egress Object Storage." Flat-rate storage with no egress fees. developers.cloudflare.com
Backblaze (2026). "B2 Cloud Storage Pricing." Storage rate, three-times free egress allowance, and transaction pricing. backblaze.com
Wasabi (2026). "Hot Cloud Storage Pricing." Flat-rate storage with no egress or API fees and a 90-day minimum. wasabi.com
Google Cloud (2026). "Cloud Storage Pricing." Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive rates plus network egress. cloud.google.com
Microsoft Azure (2026). "Blob Storage Pricing." Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive block-blob rates. azure.microsoft.com
AWS (2026). "Data Transfer Pricing." Tiered internet egress starting at $0.09/GB with 100 GB per month free. aws.amazon.com

Vendor list prices change without notice — re-check the linked pages before committing spend. jslet takes no vendor sponsorship and carries no affiliate links; see about.