Cloudflare R2 versus Amazon S3 for high bandwidth workloads

Zero egress fees reduce costs for high traffic sites

Cloudflare R2 eliminates egress bandwidth fees, which makes it 99% cheaper than Amazon S3 for image hosting workloads involving 100 TB of monthly bandwidth. In a scenario where a user downloads 100 million 1 MB images, Amazon S3 costs over $7,800 in data transfer fees alone due to the high cost of moving large volumes of data across the internet. Cloudflare R2 charges $0 for these transfers. You already know that AWS egress fees often force developers into vendor lock-in. Matthew Prince, Cloudflare co-founder, states that R2 gives developers the ability to access data freely. While industry wholesale transit prices fell by an average of 23% annually over the last ten years, AWS egress fees fell by only 25% during that same period. Cloudflare suggests its R2 option is at least 10% cheaper than Amazon S3 Standard. This advantage holds for users who require high availability through automatic region selection, which determines the best storage region based on where data uploads from. Amazon S3 charges for data transfer out to the internet at $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, and the next 40 TB costs $0.085 per GB.

Storage class and operation pricing

Cloudflare R2 uses a pricing model based on total data volume and two operation classes. Class A operations, such as ListBuckets, PutObject, or CompleteMultipartUpload, mutate state, while Class B operations, such as GetObject, HeadObject, or ListObjects, read existing state. For the Infrequent Access tier, Cloudflare charges a data retrieval fee of $0.01 per GB. This tier also requires a 30-day minimum storage duration for any object.

Cloudflare includes a free tier for Standard storage that provides 10 GB of storage, 1 million Class A requests, and 10 million Class B requests per month. Amazon S3 offers a free tier that lasts only 12 months and includes 5 GB of storage and 20,000 GET requests. Cloudflare rounds usage up to the next billing unit, so 1.1 GB of usage becomes 2 GB. To move data from S3 to R2, users can use the Super Slurper migration service, which is free to use but charges for the Class A operations it makes to the R2 bucket. Class A operations include ListMultipartUpload, UploadPart, and PutBucket. Class B operations include HeadBucket, HeadObject, and ListObjects.

Workload selection between R2 and S3

The choice between providers depends on the specific data access pattern of the application. R2 provides better value for high-traffic assets like media files, but S3 Intelligent-Tiering remains more cost-effective for large-scale data archival. For a document cloud storing 500 TB of files with only 0.1% regular access, S3 Intelligent-Tiering costs $2,022, whereas R2 costs $7,500. Amazon S3 includes automation tools like S3 Storage Lens and S3 Inventory to manage massive datasets. S3 also uses tiered pricing for the first 50 TB at $0.023 per GB, with rates dropping to $0.022 for the next 450 TB. For the S3 IA tier, the storage cost is $0.0125 per GB. S3 IA also charges a retrieval fee of $0.01 per GB, matching the R2 Infrequent Access retrieval cost. R2 lacks these complex storage classes and does not support object lifecycles in the same way. For high-volume users, the difference in request costs is stark: R2 Class B operations cost $0.36 per million requests, while S3 requests cost $0.0004 per million. Which provider handles long-term compliance better?