S3 Storage Price Per TB in 2026: AWS vs Google vs Azure vs Backblaze vs Wasabi vs R2 vs Hetzner

The per-TB table, with the date and region attached

Here is the headline storage price per TB per month for seven S3-compatible object stores, checked May 2026. Rates are list prices for the cheapest standard hot tier, single region, before requests and egress. Where a provider quotes per GB, the per-TB figure is that rate times 1,000.

Storage alone spreads almost 4× between AWS at $23 and Backblaze at $6. The sticker price is the least interesting number on this page. Look at the egress column — that is where the real money hides.

Why the hyperscalers look 4× more expensive

AWS, Google, and Azure price storage at $0.018–$0.023/GB-month. Backblaze, Wasabi, and Hetzner sit near $0.006–$0.008. The independents are not running different physics on the same spinning rust. They run leaner regions, default to fewer nines of cross-region replication, and don't bankroll a compute empire next door out of the storage line item.

What you buy with the hyperscaler premium is the rest of the platform sitting one API call away: IAM, Lambda, lifecycle transitions to Glacier at $0.004/GB, native cross-region replication, the deepest tooling ecosystem anywhere. If your data already lives next to your compute, paying $23/TB to never cross a cloud boundary can be the rational call. Per-TB storage price is a poor proxy for total cost when the workload is chatty.

Egress is the number that decides the bill

Store 50 TB on AWS S3 and storage costs about $1,150 a month. Serve that 50 TB to the internet once and AWS bills roughly $4,400 more in data-transfer-out at $0.09/GB for the first tranche. The egress dwarfs the storage by nearly 4×. That single line is why "S3 price per TB" comparisons mislead.

The independents attack exactly this number:

• Cloudflare R2 charges $0 egress to the internet, full stop. You pay $15/TB storage plus per-operation fees — $4.50 per million Class A writes, $0.36 per million Class B reads. For download-heavy serving it is often the cheapest option that exists, even though its raw storage runs more than double Backblaze's.
• Backblaze B2 gives free egress up to 3× your average stored volume, then $10/TB. Route downloads through partner CDNs like Cloudflare, Fastly, or bunny.net and that egress is unmetered.
• Wasabi bundles egress under a fair-use 1:1 rule: monthly downloads can't exceed stored volume. It enforces a 1 TB monthly minimum and a 90-day minimum storage duration, and its pay-as-you-go rate moves to $7.99/TB on 1 July 2026.
• Hetzner Object Storage includes 1 TB of storage and 1 TB of egress in its €6.49 base (raised from €4.99 on 1 April 2026), then charges €1/TB ($1.20) beyond that. For European workloads it is close to the cheapest all-in number on the table.

Plug your real read/write ratio into each provider's calculator before trusting any single per-TB figure. A backup archive you write once and rarely read favours Backblaze or Hetzner. A media bucket fronting a busy site favours R2's zero egress. AWS wins when the bytes never leave AWS.

The fine print the sticker price hides

Three line items quietly turn a "cheap" provider expensive. Request pricing comes first: R2's per-operation charges and the S3 PUT/GET/LIST split punish workloads with millions of small objects. Minimum storage duration is next — Wasabi's 90-day floor and S3 Infrequent Access early-deletion fees bill churned data as if it never moved. Then region multipliers: every figure above is a cheap region, and S3 in São Paulo or Sydney runs 10–30% higher. The headline rate is the floor, never the average.

Where encrypted consumer storage sits — a different question

Raw S3 object storage and end-to-end encrypted cloud storage are not the same product, so comparing their per-TB prices head to head is a category error. With AWS, Google, or Azure you rent bytes and bring your own encryption, key management, sharing, sync, and clients. The provider holds the keys and can read the objects unless you build a zero-knowledge layer on top yourself.

Beebeeb is that layer, productised. We store data on dedicated servers in Falkenstein, Germany, and the per-TB economics of the underlying disks sit at the cheap end of this table — but what you pay for is an encrypted, zero-knowledge product, not a raw bucket. Files are encrypted on your device with AES-256-GCM under keys derived from your passphrase via Argon2id; we never see plaintext and never hold your keys. Our pricing is flat and per-tier, not per-GB metered: Starter is €1.99/month for 100 GB, Basic €3.99 for 200 GB, Pro €10.99 for 1 TB, with self-serve expansion up to 99 TB at +€10.99 per extra TB and a custom quote beyond that. No separate egress bill, no surprise request line.

That €10.99/TB is more than Hetzner's raw €6.49 and well above Backblaze's $6 — and it should be, because you are not buying raw bytes. You are buying encryption that happens before upload, sharing with expiry and revocation, file versioning with retention you configure, file requests, and clients that handle the crypto so you don't have to. The product clients are open source; the security model is the thing you're actually paying for, and the storage is just the substrate underneath it. Every tier is zero-knowledge, no exceptions — try it if you want to feel the gap between renting a bucket and holding your own keys. The full feature set is what justifies the premium over a naked S3 endpoint.

If you only need raw object storage and you handle your own encryption, the table above is your shortlist: R2 for egress-heavy serving, Backblaze or Hetzner for archive, AWS when the data already lives in AWS. If you need storage that is private by construction, per-TB sticker price is the wrong axis to optimise on.