The Real Price of S3-Compatible Storage: 13 Providers Compared (Sep 2026)
Object storage pricing looks simple until you line up 13 providers on one screen. The same S3 API sells for $4.36/TB/mo at one end and $29.74/TB/mo at the other. And the list price is only half the story — egress policy, retention minimums, API fees, and object-lock support decide the actual bill.
This is a live snapshot from the aggregation.marketplace storage tracker: 13 providers, 26 configurations, updated hourly, with prices in their native units (no fake normalization) and egress shown as the real policy.
What the tracker covers
- 13 providers: Backblaze, Wasabi, Storj, Cloudflare R2, OVHcloud, Hetzner, IDrive e2, Rabata, Alibaba OSS, Huawei OBS, Yandex, Selectel, Cloud.ru.
- 26 configurations across hot, cold/IA, and archive classes.
- Prices kept in their native unit: $/TB/mo, $/TB-yr contracts, $49/10TB blocks.
- Egress as the real policy — unconditional free, fair-use ratio, or paid per-TB.
- Badges for annual/hourly billing, retention windows, minimums, and per-operation API fees.
Class floors right now
The cheapest live plan per provider and class (green = cheaper within class; dashed cells = block/annual tariffs, not ranked):
- Hot from $5.00/TB/mo — IDrive e2 (Veeam/MSP/reseller tier)
- Cold / IA from $4.36/TB/mo — OVHcloud Infrequent Access
- Archive from $4.91/TB/mo — Alibaba OSS Archive (LRS, CN)
The spread inside a single class is enormous: hot storage runs from $5.00 (IDrive) to $29.74 (Selectel S3 standard) — a 6× gap between S3-compatible vendors. Among global S3-compatible options with solid guarantees, Backblaze B2 at $6.95 and Storj at $7.00 stay the cheapest hot plans.
Cheapest live plans, sorted by price
| Provider | Plan | Class | Price | Region |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OVHcloud | Object Storage Infrequent Access (30-day retention) | cold | $4.36/TB/mo | us |
| Alibaba Cloud OSS | OSS Archive (LRS, CN) | archive | $4.91/TB/mo | cn |
| IDrive e2 | e2 Veeam/MSP/Reseller (monthly) | hot | $5.00/TB/mo | global |
| IDrive e2 | e2 Standard (pay-as-you-go) | hot | $6.00/TB/mo | global |
| Backblaze | B2 Cloud Storage | hot | $6.95/TB/mo | global |
| Storj | Object Storage Standard | hot | $7.00/TB/mo | global |
| Yandex | Object Storage ICE (RU, min 12 mo) | archive | $7.35/TB/mo | ru |
| Wasabi | Hot Cloud Storage (90-day retention) | hot | $7.99/TB/mo | global |
| Hetzner | Object Storage (1 TB incl.) | hot | $7.99/TB/mo | eu |
| OVHcloud | Object Storage Standard (30-day retention) | hot | $8.11/TB/mo | us |
| Rabata | S3 Hot Storage | hot | $10.00/TB/mo | global |
| Cloudflare R2 | R2 Infrequent Access | cold | $10.00/TB/mo | global |
| Storj | Object Storage Advanced (US SOC2) | hot | $10.00/TB/mo | us |
The fine print that changes the bill
"Free egress" is three different products. Unconditional free (OVHcloud, Cloudflare R2). Free up to a stored-volume ratio — Backblaze 3×, IDrive 3×, Wasabi 1:1 fair-use. Or paid per-TB — Storj at $7/TB, Rabata at $10/TB, and most RU/CN providers bill egress outright.
Retention minimums are a hidden price. Wasabi holds objects for 90 days, OVHcloud and Storj for 30, Yandex ICE for 365. Delete early and you still pay the full window. On churn-heavy workloads this doubles the effective per-TB cost.
API fees invert "cheap" math. Cloudflare R2 looks aggressive at $15/TB hot with zero egress — until you count per-operation charges (Class A $4.50/1M, Class B $0.36/1M) and notice R2 has no versioning and no object lock. Backblaze and Wasabi ship both features at lower storage prices.
"—" means not disclosed, not supported. Several CN and RU providers (Alibaba, Huawei, Cloud.ru) leave versioning and object lock undisclosed; the tracker marks them honestly instead of assuming.
Bottom line
- Cheapest hot S3-compatible, global, no gotchas: Backblaze B2 at $6.95, Storj at $7.00.
- Cheapest cold/IA: OVHcloud Infrequent Access at $4.36 (30-day retention, free egress).
- Cheapest archive: Alibaba OSS Archive at $4.91 (CN region).
- Zero-egress hot serving: Cloudflare R2 at $15/TB — but budget the API operations and check whether you need object lock.
- Backup/DR with heavy restores: Rabata S3 Backup flat $49/10TB with no egress fees on restores — roughly $4.9/TB effective.
Prices refresh continuously. The full interactive view — heatmap, class floors, presets for S3-compatible / no-egress-fees / cold-archive filtering, and live listings — is at aggregation.marketplace/storage.
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