S3 egress vs Cloudflare R2
By SightLab editors · 2026-08-22
Storage plus requests plus internet egress for a download-heavy object workload on S3 Standard versus R2 Standard.
Object storage list prices look similar until you add the download path. S3 Standard in us-east-1 is about $0.023/GB-month. R2 Standard is $0.015/GB-month with 10 GB free. The decision usually flips on internet egress and on Class A/B operations, not on the storage line alone.
Download-heavy worked example
Hold 500 GB stored, 50,000 writes, 5,000,000 reads, and 5 TB internet download. Free tiers on. Using SightLab’s published storage and egress catalogs:
- S3 Standard us-east-1: storage ≈ $11.39, writes ≈ $0.24, reads ≈ $1.99, egress after 100 GB free ≈ $441. Total ≈ $455.
- R2 Standard: storage ≈ $7.35 after 10 GB free, writes and reads inside the included Class A/B grants, egress $0. Total ≈ $7.35.
When the gap shrinks
If almost no bytes leave the bucket (backups that are written once and rarely restored), both bills collapse to storage plus a little request cost, and S3’s ecosystem (lifecycle, replication, inventory, IAM) can dominate the choice. If the workload is millions of tiny PUTs, R2 Class A at $4.50/million can exceed S3 PUT pricing. Always run the object storage calculator with your own write/read mix.
Assumptions to keep visible
No Intelligent-Tiering, no Glacier restore, no CloudFront. Decimal GB. On-demand list prices, not an invoice. Re-run from the object storage calculator with provider AWS versus Cloudflare and the same stored GB and egress GB.
Related tools
- Object Storage Cost Calculator — Break down storage, requests, retrieval, and egress for S3, Blob, GCS, and R2.
- Cloud Data Egress Cost Calculator — Estimate monthly internet and cross-region data-transfer cost from a source region.