The sticker price is the smallest line on the invoice
The number a provider puts on its pricing page is rarely the number you pay. At scale your bill is storage, plus egress to read your own data, plus fractions of a cent per thousand requests, plus minimum-duration penalties on files you already deleted. The headline rate is the part designed to be screenshotted. The rest lives in a calculator nobody opens. Below is the worked annual total cost of ownership at three real sizes — 1 TB, 50 TB, and 99 TB — with the variable that wrecks the math, data egress, modelled at light, medium, and heavy read volume.
Every per-unit rate is current as of mid-2026 and cited. Treat the totals as a model, not a quote: your egress, request count, and region all move them. The assumptions are spelled out so you can re-run the rows against your own traffic.
What pricing shape are you actually choosing?
Hyperscaler object storage charges you on every axis at once. AWS S3 Standard is $0.023/GB-month in us-east-1 for the first 50 TB, and internet egress starts at $0.09/GB for the first 10 TB each month. Google Cloud Storage stores at a slightly lower rate but bills $0.12/GB on the first terabyte of egress — about a third more than S3 on the read side. Storage is the bait; egress is where the bill is made.
The budget object stores flip that. Backblaze B2 runs $6/TB-month with free egress up to 3× your stored volume, then $0.01/GB. Wasabi is $6.99/TB-month, rising to $7.99 on 1 July 2026, with egress that's free under a 1:1 ratio to stored data and a 100 TB monthly ceiling — but with a 1 TB monthly minimum charge and a 90-day minimum storage duration on pay-as-you-go. Cheap to keep, restrictive to move or churn.
A third shape is flat per-TB with egress included, which is where beebeeb sits. The consumer subscription bundle — iCloud, Dropbox, Google One — is a fourth, and it falls out of this comparison past a few terabytes because the ceilings are low and the per-TB rate gets worse as you grow, not better.
1 TB: the small-team or personal-archive case
At a terabyte storage is cheap everywhere, so egress is the only thing separating the bills. Light assumption: you read back roughly 200 GB a month — restores, the odd bulk download — about 2.4 TB out per year.
| Provider | Storage / yr | Egress / yr (light) | All-in / yr |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 Standard | ~$276 | ~$216 | ~$490 + requests |
| Google Cloud Storage | ~$276 | ~$285 | ~$560 + requests |
| Backblaze B2 | ~$72 | $0 (within 3× free) | ~$72 |
| Wasabi | ~$96 | $0 (within 1:1) | ~$96 |
| beebeeb (Basic, 1 TB) | €10.99/mo flat, egress included | €131.88 | |
The budget object stores win on raw price here, and they should — that's their job. beebeeb's €131.88/year for 1 TB isn't trying to undercut a B2 bucket on cents per gigabyte. It's a different product: files are encrypted on your machine before upload, the provider only ever holds ciphertext, and a real sync-and-share client comes with it. At this tier S3 already costs roughly 4× a flat per-TB plan, almost entirely on read fees.
50 TB: where egress starts deciding the answer
Fifty terabytes is a serious media library or a company's shared store. Medium assumption: 10 TB out per month — active use, not cold archive — so 120 TB a year.
| Provider | Storage / yr | Egress / yr (medium) | All-in / yr |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 Standard | ~$13,800 | ~$10,200 | ~$24,000 + requests |
| Backblaze B2 | ~$3,600 | $0 (120 TB < 150 TB free) | ~$3,600 |
| Wasabi | ~$4,795 | $0 (within 1:1 cap) | ~$4,795 |
| beebeeb (50 TB) | €10.99/TB flat, egress included | €6,594 | |
The S3 figure is the one that stops you: roughly $24,000 a year, and nearly half of it is the toll for reading data you already own. B2 and Wasabi look dramatically cheaper, and at this read volume they genuinely are — as long as you stay inside their egress allowances. beebeeb's €10.99 × 50 = €6,594 is flat, so reading a file once costs the same as reading it a thousand times, because there's no egress meter to start.
This is the line worth internalising: the budget object stores are cheap until you move data. Their economics assume it mostly sits still. The moment a workload reads back more than the free allowance, the character of the bill changes.
99 TB with heavy egress: where the cheap tiers turn on you
Ninety-nine terabytes is the top of beebeeb's self-serve range, which makes it a fair ceiling to stress-test. Heavy assumption: 30 TB out per month — a live, read-heavy workload — which is 360 TB a year.
| Provider | Storage / yr | Egress / yr (heavy) | All-in / yr |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 Standard | ~$26,700 | ~$28,800 | ~$55,000+ + requests |
| Backblaze B2 | ~$7,128 | ~$630 (63 TB over free) | ~$7,758 |
| Wasabi | ~$9,492 | $0 (30 TB/mo within ratio + ceiling) | ~$9,492 |
| beebeeb (99 TB) | €10.99/TB flat, egress included | €13,056 | |
S3 crosses $55,000 a year, and for the first time egress alone outweighs storage. That's the whole hyperscaler tax in one number: at heavy read volume you pay more to look at your data than to keep it. B2 stays remarkably cheap even here, because its 3× free-egress band (297 TB/year on 99 TB stored) absorbs most of the traffic and only the overflow gets billed at a penny a gig. Credit where it's due — for a high-storage, moderate-egress archive, B2 is genuinely hard to beat on price, and I won't pretend otherwise.
What the table doesn't show is the fine print baked into the cheap tiers. Push Wasabi past its 1:1 egress ratio and you're outside fair-use, where it can throttle bandwidth or move you to another plan. Delete churny data inside the 90-day minimum and you keep paying for storage you're not using. Those aren't edge cases — they're the terms. beebeeb's €10.99/TB up to 99 TB carries no egress meter, no minimum-duration penalty, and no ratio cap. Past 99 TB it becomes a custom quote rather than a self-serve number, which I'd rather state plainly than print "unlimited" and quietly throttle you later.
What's missing from every column: the soft costs
The hardest TCO line to put in a table is the one that isn't a rate. Hyperscaler and budget object storage both hand you an S3 bucket and an API — no sync client, no sharing UI, no recovery flow. Turning that into something a non-engineer can actually use is your project, paid in engineer-hours that never appear on the invoice. A break-even of $6/TB raw storage against a managed flat-rate plan should count those hours, because they're real money.
That's what the flat-rate, full-client model is charging a premium for. beebeeb's price already includes a web app and the bb CLI, encrypted sharing with expiry and passphrase protection, file versioning with configurable retention, and file requests — and client-side AES-256-GCM encryption before anything leaves your machine, so the storage cost and the privacy posture arrive in one line item rather than two separate builds. Native desktop and mobile apps, plus Google-Drive and Dropbox import, are coming soon; the web app and CLI are what ship today.
How to actually pick
- A cold archive you rarely read. Backblaze B2 is the cheapest serious option, full stop. Concede it, pay
$6/TB, and move on. - Anything with real read traffic. The hyperscaler egress meter is the killer. A flat-rate plan with egress included pulls ahead somewhere between light and medium read volume, and the gap only widens from there.
- Data that has to stay private and auditable. Here the question stops being cents per gigabyte. A raw bucket gives you encryption in transit at best — the provider can still read your files. A zero-knowledge flat-rate plan holds only ciphertext, which changes both your breach exposure and the GDPR processor story you have to tell.
Run your own monthly egress through these three rows before you sign anything; the read volume is the number that decides it. If you'd rather feel the flat-rate, zero-knowledge shape than model it,