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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Cloudflare R2 Has a Free Tier — S3-Compatible Object Storage With Zero Egress Fees

#webdev #api #tutorial #cloud

AWS S3 charges you to store data AND to retrieve it. The egress fees are the nasty surprise — serving 1TB of images costs $90/month just in bandwidth.

Cloudflare R2 gives you S3-compatible storage with zero egress fees. The free tier includes 10GB storage and 10 million reads/month. Zero. Egress. Fees.

What You Get for Free

  • 10 GB storage — enough for thousands of files
  • 1 million writes/month — PUT, POST, DELETE
  • 10 million reads/month — GET requests
  • Zero egress fees — serve files globally, pay nothing for bandwidth
  • S3-compatible API — use any S3 SDK or tool
  • Custom domains — serve from your own domain
  • Workers integration — process files at the edge

Quick Start

1. Create a Bucket

In Cloudflare Dashboard > R2 > Create bucket. Get your Account ID and generate an API token with R2 permissions.

2. Node.js (AWS SDK) 

npm install @aws-sdk/client-s3
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import { S3Client, PutObjectCommand, GetObjectCommand } from "@aws-sdk/client-s3";

const r2 = new S3Client({
  region: "auto",
  endpoint: "https://YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID.r2.cloudflarestorage.com",
  credentials: {
    accessKeyId: "YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
    secretAccessKey: "YOUR_SECRET_KEY",
  },
});

// Upload a file
await r2.send(new PutObjectCommand({
  Bucket: "my-bucket",
  Key: "images/photo.jpg",
  Body: fileBuffer,
  ContentType: "image/jpeg",
}));

// Download a file
const response = await r2.send(new GetObjectCommand({
  Bucket: "my-bucket",
  Key: "images/photo.jpg",
}));
const data = await response.Body.transformToByteArray();
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3. Python (boto3) 

import boto3

r2 = boto3.client(
    "s3",
    endpoint_url="https://YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID.r2.cloudflarestorage.com",
    aws_access_key_id="YOUR_ACCESS_KEY",
    aws_secret_access_key="YOUR_SECRET_KEY",
    region_name="auto",
)

# Upload
r2.upload_file("photo.jpg", "my-bucket", "images/photo.jpg")

# Download
r2.download_file("my-bucket", "images/photo.jpg", "downloaded.jpg")

# List files
objects = r2.list_objects_v2(Bucket="my-bucket", Prefix="images/")
for obj in objects.get("Contents", []):
    print(f"{obj['Key']} — {obj['Size']} bytes")
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4. CLI (rclone or AWS CLI) 

# AWS CLI
aws s3 cp photo.jpg s3://my-bucket/images/ \
  --endpoint-url https://YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID.r2.cloudflarestorage.com

# List
aws s3 ls s3://my-bucket/ \
  --endpoint-url https://YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID.r2.cloudflarestorage.com
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5. Serve Files via Custom Domain

Connect a custom domain in Cloudflare Dashboard and your files are instantly served via Cloudflare CDN — cached at 300+ edge locations worldwide.

https://cdn.yourdomain.com/images/photo.jpg
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Global delivery. Zero egress costs. Automatic caching.

The Egress Math

Provider 1TB egress/month
AWS S3 $90
Google Cloud Storage $120
Azure Blob $87
Cloudflare R2 $0

Real-World Use Case

A developer hosting a podcast told me: "Each episode is 50MB. With 10K downloads per episode on S3, I was paying $45/month just in bandwidth. Moved to R2, same URLs, same S3 API — bandwidth bill dropped to $0. I only pay $0.36/month for storage."

Free Plan Limits

Feature Free Tier
Storage 10 GB
Reads (GET) 10M/month
Writes (PUT) 1M/month
Egress Always free
S3 API Compatible
Custom domains Yes

The Bottom Line

If you are serving files to users — images, videos, downloads, static assets — R2 saves you real money. S3 compatibility means migration takes minutes, not days.

Need to store scraped data? Check out my web scraping tools on Apify — extract data from any website and export to any storage.

Building something custom? Email me at spinov001@gmail.com

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