AWS S3 object storage used to be the only place you would seriously look at when you needed a highly available object storage service. AWS S3 storage is still a mainstay for many but unlike a few years ago you now have more options than you used to do. AWS S3 storage might have been a mainstay but it had problems. One it was expensive for storage, if you can even understand or comprehend the pricing structure for storage. Then you need to try and calculate the cost for requests and bandwidth. The whole pricing structure of AWS S3 is designed to be complicated and make it difficult to know what your actual costs will be. That alone keeps smaller companies and individuals away from using them because who needs to be hit with a huge bill from AWS S3 when you are trying to build your business.

If you or your company are looking at using an AWS S3 storage for a project or wanting to move to another service to save money here are nine options that you might want to take a look at. The majority of them simplify the pricing structure and make it considerably easier to calculate what your exact cost might be. There can still be some guess work involved, especially since calculating the number of API calls you are going to make can be difficult.

Deciding on what AWS S3 compatible service to choose will really depend on the nature of your project. If you are looking for an offsite cloud storage for backups the number of data centers might not be as important as simply the cost of storage. If your project is to host images or video for a website you would probably be more interested in using an S3 storage service that is either from your web host or part of the Cloudflare bandwidth alliance so you can save money on the bandwidth you will use. You really need to have a sense of what you are going to do before deciding.

Cloudflare R2

Cloudflare is known for a lot of things, and only made R2 generally available in September of 2022 and if you use Cloudflare Workers you might be even more interested in using R2. Cloudflare R2 pricing is also pretty straight forward compared to AWS. Here is the pricing information I was able to find.

Free tier pricing

• Storage 10GB/month
• Class A Operations 1 million requests / month
• Class B Operations 10 million requests / month

Paid tier pricing

• Storage $0.015/GB/month
• Class A Operations $4.50 / million requests
• Class B Operations $0.36 / million requests

Backblaze B2

Backblaze was most known for their unlimited personal backup service but over the years their B2 service has become better and grown into a more robust service. They even recently added a new US East Region to B2. The downside it probably the number of regions where you can create storage buckets. But if you are in the US or Canada the west and east regions are probably fast enough and they offer one EU region. Price wise Backblaze is one of the most economical AWS S3 alternatives and since they are also part of bandwidth alliance download fees can be $0.00 if using Cloudflare on a public bucket. Backblaze is the service I personally use for a small project and the combination of 10GB free and free bandwidth using Cloudflare I rarely have any cost with my little project.

Pricing

• 10GB free storage
• Storage after the first 10GB is $0.005/GB/month.
• Download bandwidth $0.01/GB. The first 1GB of data downloaded each day is free. Cloud replication download of files across regions is free. Downloads through most CDN and Compute partners are also free.
• Class A transactions - Free
• Class B transactions - $0.004 per 10,000 with 2,500 free per day.
• Class C transactions - $0.004 per 1,000 with 2,500 free per day.

IDrive E2

IDrive is another company that is more well known for their online backup service but have expanded adding an S3 compatible cloud storage service. IDrive launched E2 in April of 2022. Unlike Backblaze, IDrive has 14 locations across the US, Canada and Europe so there are certainly more options for what region to store your data.

Pricing The IDrive E2 pricing is also pretty simple compared to AWS S3.

• 10GB free storage
• Storage after the first 10GB is $0.004/GB/month.
• Download bandwidth is free BUT, and this is the least clear thing I found in the IDrive E2 pricing, IDrive reserve the right to charge $0.01/GB/Month. See Idrive E2 FAQ.
• Class A transactions - Free
• Class B transactions - Free
• Class C transactions - Free

Idrive is also the only company that offers an affiliate program for their AWS S3 compatible service. If you feel so inclined here is my affiliate link for Idrive E2. Know that I will greatly appreciate your clicking and possible purchase. Thanks.

Wasabi

I did not know a great deal about Wasabi before writing this post actually. I had to go digging a little bit to find out more about them. If you don’t know a great deal about them here is the Wikipedia link.

From what I can tell they offer 12 storage regions around the world and have one of the most simple pricing plans available with a pay as you go pricing plan but there does appear to be a catch that is not easy to spot. They have a minimum storage duration policy that might have you paying for storage even if you have deleted the data already. If you just plan on uploading a lot of data and not deleting it you might never have this problem but if you add and delete data you might end up with a larger bill than you expect. Something to keep in mind if you are thinking of using Wasabi for your cloud storage.

Pricing

• $.0059 per GB/mo ($5.99 per TB/month). Minimum charge of $5.99/month.
• No additional charges for egress or API requests means you don’t pay to access your data.
• Part of bandwidth alliance

Storj

Storj is the only blockchain distributed service on the list. Storj at first glance does not appear to be the cheapest option available, mainly since you need to pay for bandwidth, but you might want to do some calculations to confirm that. For example when I calculated the actual cost of using Storj it worked out very close to the other services on this list. Bandwidth is the wildcard here, if you need constant access and downloads this is where your price might fluctuate.

While the service is S3 compatible there are some differences that I do know of. For example last I tried Storj there is no way to create a public bucket so if you want to use Storj as a CDN for hosting images or website static resources you might be out of luck.

Pricing Free Tier

• 150GB free storage
• 150GB bandwidth/month

Pro Tier

• $4.00/TB/Month or $0.004/GB/month
• $7.00/TB/Month bandwidth or $0.007/GB/month

DigitalOcean Spaces

I like DigitalOcean hosting, in fact this site is hosted on a DigitalOcean Droplet, but I will be honest I have never used the DigitalOcean Spaces product. If you are already hosting on DigitalOcean it might be handy to host use their S3 compatible storage as well.

Pricing

• $5.00/month for 250GB and 1TB of outbound bandwidth.
• $0.02/GB additional storage.
• $0.01/GB additional transfer.

Vultr Object Storage

Like the DigitalOcean offering, Vultr offers a convenient service to host websites, apps and cloud storage. Pricing is almost identical to DigitalOcean but Vultr is part of the bandwidth alliance so if you are transferring data for a website with Cloudflare or another bandwidth alliance partner you can take advantage of no bandwidth fees. If I were to choose between DigitalOcean, Vultr or Linode for object storage and I was building a website or app of some kind I would probably consider Vultr over the others based on the fact they are part of the bandwidth alliance.

Pricing

• $5.00/month for 250 GB of Storage and 1 TB of bandwidth
• $0.02/additional GB stored
• $10.00/additional TB transferred
• Part of bandwidth alliance

Linode Object Storage

It is not surprising that the offerings from DigitalOcean, Vultr and Linode for object storage is almost identical since many of the services they offer are very similar. Again if you are already using Linode this might be a good option.

Pricing

• 250 GB 1 TB Outbound Transfer
• $.02 / GB Additional Storage
• $.01 / GB Additional Outbound Transferred

DreamHost DreamObjects

DreamHost is the only more traditional web hosting companies that offers object storage and in my opinion is a little out of place for them. If you are a developer are you really using DreamHost for your projects? I have had clients that hosted websites on DreamHost in the past and the main reason DreamHost was chosen was because DreamHost was easy, and easy is good for web hosting. Easy is generally not what you think of when it comes to object storage, so DreamHost DreamObjects feels out of place. That said their pricing is competitive with the cloud providers like DigitalOcean, Linode and Vultr and they are part of the bandwidth alliance so perhaps they are what you need.

Pricing

• $0.025/GB of storage per month
• $0.05/GB of downloads/month
• Free API Requests
• Also offers a prepaid plan
• Part of bandwidth alliance

Overall

For the most part what AWS S3 compatible service you decide to use for your project it is pricing that will be the most difficult to sort out. AWS S3 pricing to begin with with Amazon is a nightmare and impossible to determine and while the S3 compatible services have tried to make it easier they all seem to want to make it difficult to compare pricing and it still feels like many try to hide fees behind policies that if you don’t read close enough you will be on the hook for huge fees for months. To try and make this easier I have tried to create a table to compare them all apples to apples so you can get a sense of what each service actually costs. Please note that you should do your own pricing before signing up for a service. You have been warned.

Service	Storage/GB	Bandwidth/GB	Class A / million	Class B / million	Class C / million	Bandwidth Alliance
Cloudflare	$0.0150	$0.000	$4.500	$0.360	$0.000	Yes
Backblaze B2	$0.0050	$0.010	$0.000	$0.400	$4.000	Yes
IDrive	$0.0040	$0.010	$0.000	$0.000	$0.000	No
Wasabi	$0.0059	$0.000	$0.000	$0.000	$0.000	Yes
Storj	$0.0040	$0.007	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	No
DigitalOcean Spaces	$0.0200	$0.010	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	No
Vultr Object Storage	$0.0200	$0.010	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	Yes
Linode Object Storage	$0.0200	$0.010	Unknown	Unknown	Unknown	No
DreamHost DreamObjects	$0.0250	$0.050	$0.000	$0.000	$0.000	Yes

If any of my calculations are off please let me know and I will be happy to update the table.

What S3 compatible service do you like to use? What is your favorite and why? Let us know in the comments.