Published 2026-04-03 · Reviewed 2026-08-27, corrections outstanding · Data verified from our index of 1,547 developer tools · 15+ storage & CDN services compared
Quick verdict:Cloudflare R2 is the standout choice for most developers — 10 GB storage with zero egress fees, S3-compatible API, and a permanent free tier. At scale, the savings are staggering: 5 TB stored + 50 TB egress costs $75/month on R2 vs $4,625/month on S3. Storj offers the largest starting capacity at 25 GB, but as a 30-day trial rather than a free tier — a $5 minimum monthly fee applies once it ends. Backblaze B2 has the cheapest paid storage at $6.95/TB/30-day and gives every account free egress up to 3x what it stores, no CDN needed — which makes it the cheapest column in the scaling table below, not R2’s equal. For media: Cloudinary (25 credits/month) and BunnyCDN ($0.01/GB, 14-day trial) are best-in-class. For self-hosted: MinIO is the industry standard.
The S3 egress tax is legendary. AWS S3 egress charges are the #1 developer bill shock story. S3 bills across 6 dimensions most developers don’t know about: storage, egress, PUT requests, GET requests, lifecycle transitions, and the hidden NAT Gateway charge ($0.045/GB) that appears on your EC2 bill, not your S3 bill. At 1 TB/month egress, S3 costs $92 in bandwidth alone. R2 costs $0. This single difference has disrupted the entire cloud storage market.
Free tier: 10 GB storage, 1M Class A operations (writes), 10M Class B operations (reads) per month. The defining feature: zero egress fees, ever. No bandwidth charges regardless of how much data you serve. S3-compatible API, Workers integration for edge compute on your objects, and automatic global distribution. The free tier has no SLA but uses the same infrastructure as paid. At scale: 5 TB stored + 50 TB egress = $75/month vs $4,625/month on S3. Best for any project where read-heavy access patterns would make S3 egress costs unsustainable.
Free tier: 5 GB storage with globally distributed access included. S3-compatible API with automatic data distribution to Fly.io edge regions near your users. No separate egress charges on the free tier. Integrated with Fly.io deployments but usable independently. Paid: $0.02/GB storage, $0 egress. The R2 challenger with stronger geographic distribution built-in. Best for globally-distributed apps that need low-latency object access without configuring CDN.
Free tier: 10 GB storage, always free. S3-compatible API. Key advantage: free egress up to 3x your average monthly storage, for every account, with no CDN required — store 10 GB and 30 GB/month leaves free. Egress beyond 3x is $0.01/GB, 9x cheaper than S3, and unmetered through a partner CDN (Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net, CacheFly and others). Class A, B and C API calls are free on pay-as-you-go. Storage is $6.95/TB/30-day, the cheapest of the four majors here. Long-standing indie company with a stable track record. Best for large file storage, and cheapest of all when reads stay inside 3x.
Free trial: 25 GB storage free for 30 days, no credit card required. There is no permanent free tier. After the trial it is $7/TB stored and $7/TB egress against a $5 minimum monthly fee — waived during the trial and for accounts paying in STORJ token. Decentralized storage network: files encrypted, split, and distributed across independent nodes. S3-compatible gateway. Edge-optimized downloads (retrieves from nearest nodes). Unique trade-off: decentralized architecture means slightly higher first-byte latency, but competitive download speeds and inherent data redundancy.
Wasabi
Pricing: No free tier, but flat $6.99/TB/month with zero egress fees. S3-compatible. 90-day minimum storage duration. The budget alternative to S3 for egress-heavy workloads. At 10 TB stored + 50 TB egress: Wasabi = $70/month vs S3 = $4,730/month. Not free, but the math is dramatic at scale.
Cloud Provider Storage
Object storage from major cloud providers. Tightly integrated with their ecosystems but with the most expensive egress pricing.
AWS S3 12-MONTH FREE ONLY
Free tier: 5 GB storage, 20,000 GET requests, 2,000 PUT requests per month — for 12 months only. After the trial, you pay from the first byte: $0.023/GB storage, $0.09/GB egress, $0.005/1K PUT, $0.0004/1K GET. S3 is the industry standard with the broadest SDK ecosystem, but has the most expensive egress and the least generous free tier. Plus the hidden NAT Gateway charge ($0.045/GB) on EC2 instances. Best for teams already committed to AWS who need deep ecosystem integration.
Free tier: 5 GB-months/month in US regions (us-east1, us-west1, us-central1). 5,000 Class A ops, 50,000 Class B ops, 1 GB egress to North America per month. Always Free — does not expire. S3 interoperability mode available. Egress at $0.12/GB is even more expensive than S3. Integrated with BigQuery, Cloud Functions, and other GCP services. Best for GCP-native apps or when you need the Always Free guarantee.
Azure Blob Storage 12-MONTH FREE ONLY
Free tier: 5 GB LRS storage, 20,000 read/write operations, 5 GB egress — for 12 months. Egress at $0.087/GB. REST API compatible but not S3-native (Azure SDK preferred). Integrated with Azure Functions, Logic Apps, and the broader Azure ecosystem. The Founders Hub program ($150K credits) can offset costs for startups. Best for Azure-committed organizations.
Oracle Cloud Object Storage
Free tier: 10 GB storage, 10 GB egress, 50,000 API requests/month. Always Free — does not expire. S3-compatible API. Egress at $0.0085/GB is the cheapest of any hyperscaler. Combined with Oracle’s 200 GB block volume Always Free, it’s competitive for budget builds. Often overlooked but generous.
DigitalOcean Spaces
Pricing: No free tier. $5/month for 250 GB storage + 1 TB egress. S3-compatible API. Built-in CDN included. Simple, predictable pricing. Available during the $200/60-day trial. Best for DigitalOcean Droplet users wanting co-located storage.
Media & Image CDN
Specialized storage and delivery for images, video, and media assets. Not general object storage, but essential for media-heavy applications that need on-the-fly optimization.
Free tier: 25 credits/month. Credits are a unified currency: 1 credit = 1,000 transformations OR 1 GB managed storage OR 1 GB delivery bandwidth. Over 100 real-time image/video transformations: resize, crop, format conversion, face detection, background removal, AI tagging. Global CDN with automatic format optimization (WebP, AVIF). Gotcha: the credit system is confusing — 1 credit ≠ 1 GB in all cases, and some transformations cost more credits. Best for media-heavy apps that need on-the-fly optimization.
Free tier: 20 GB output bandwidth per month. URL-based image transformations (append parameters to the URL). Real-time optimization and format conversion. Global CDN. Works as an image CDN layer over any existing storage (S3, GCS, your own server). Simpler pricing model than Cloudinary’s credit system. Best for e-commerce and content sites needing image optimization without Cloudinary’s complexity.
BunnyCDN
Trial: 14-day free trial. After: $0.01/GB for most regions (cheapest mainstream CDN). 114 global PoPs. Bunny Stream for video hosting + HLS delivery. Bunny Storage for origin storage at $0.005/GB. Image processing via Bunny Optimizer. No free permanent tier, but at $0.01/GB, serving 100 GB costs $1. For many projects, this is effectively free. Best for general-purpose CDN with video support.
BaaS-Integrated Storage
Storage services bundled with Backend-as-a-Service platforms. Best when you’re already using the BaaS for auth, database, and other services.
Supabase Storage
Free tier: 1 GB file storage, 2 GB bandwidth/month. Integrated with Supabase Auth (row-level security on files), Database, and Edge Functions. Custom API (not S3-compatible). Image transformations on Pro plan. The 1 GB limit is tight, but sufficient for avatars, documents, and small media. Best for apps already on Supabase.
Firebase Storage (Cloud Storage for Firebase)
Free tier: 5 GB storage, 1 GB/day download bandwidth, 20,000 uploads/day, 50,000 downloads/day. Backed by Google Cloud Storage. Firebase Security Rules for access control. Excellent mobile SDK integration. The 1 GB/day egress limit can be restrictive for media-heavy apps. Beyond free: $0.026/GB storage, $0.12/GB egress. Best for mobile apps using Firebase suite.
Vercel Blob
Free tier: Included in Hobby plan with Vercel’s overall bandwidth limits. Edge-distributed storage with automatic CDN. Simplest API for Next.js and Vercel-hosted projects. Not S3-compatible — Vercel SDK only. Limited to Vercel ecosystem. Best for Next.js projects on Vercel that need simple file uploads.
Netlify Blobs
Free tier: Included in Netlify’s free plan. Key-value blob storage for Netlify sites and functions. Not general-purpose object storage. Best for Netlify-hosted Jamstack sites needing simple data persistence.
Self-Hosted & Open Source
Run your own object storage. Unlimited capacity, zero egress fees, full control — if you have the infrastructure and ops capability.
Free tier: none. Our own pricing change record, on 2026-02-12, says: MinIO archived its open-source GitHub repository. All development moved to proprietary MinIO AIStor. No new Docker images, PRs, or contributions accepted. Only case-by-case critical security fixes Source ↗Read what we recorded →
SeaweedFS
Cost: Free, open-source (Apache 2.0). Distributed file system + object storage. S3 API gateway. Designed for high-volume small file storage (billions of files). Lower resource footprint than MinIO for massive small-file workloads. Best for specialized use cases with billions of small objects.
Garage
Cost: Free, open-source (AGPL v3). Lightweight, S3-compatible distributed storage designed for self-hosting communities. Resilient to network partitions. Low resource requirements (runs on Raspberry Pi). Geo-distributed by design. Best for homelab enthusiasts who want decentralized storage across multiple locations.
Decentralized Storage
Web3 and decentralized storage for applications that need content addressing, immutability, or censorship resistance.
Free tier: 500 MB storage + 100 pins. IPFS pinning service with a dedicated gateway for fast retrieval. Files are content-addressed (CID-based) and available through any IPFS gateway. SDK and API for programmatic uploads. Best for NFT metadata, Web3 apps, and content that benefits from decentralized, immutable storage.
Also listed under zero-egress storage above. Storj’s decentralized architecture encrypts, splits, and distributes files across thousands of independent nodes. Unlike IPFS, Storj provides an S3-compatible API for familiar workflows while maintaining decentralized redundancy. 25 GB free for the first 30 days, then paid with a $5 monthly minimum.
Growth Cost Trap: Scaling from Free to Enterprise
Storage costs look cheap until egress hits. This is the page’s core finding: the gap between providers doesn’t show up at the free tier — it explodes at scale.
Scenario (storage + egress/mo)
Cloudflare R2
AWS S3
Backblaze B2
Google Cloud Storage
Self-Hosted (MinIO)
100 GB + 100 GB egress
$1.50
$11.30
$0.70
$14
~$5 (infra)
1 TB + 1 TB egress
$15
$113
$6.95
$140
~$20 (infra)
10 TB + 10 TB egress
$150
$1,130
$69.50
$1,400
~$80 (infra)
100 TB + 100 TB egress
$1,500
$11,300
$695
$14,000
~$500 (infra)
How to read this table: every column is that provider’s published pay-as-you-go rate for the row’s workload, read 2026-09-07, with each provider’s own egress allowance applied. Backblaze B2 egress is free up to 3x average monthly storage, then $0.01/GB. No other column has an allowance that scales, so their egress bills at the headline rate from the first byte. Fixed monthly grants are not netted out of any column, so no provider is credited one the others do not get: Cloudflare R2 gives every account 10 GB of storage free each month; AWS S3 gives every account the first 100 GB of internet egress free each month; Backblaze B2 gives every account 10 GB of storage free each month; Google Cloud Storage gives every account 5 GB of storage free each month. At the 100 GB row those grants are most of the bill; by 10 TB they are a rounding error. Volume discounts and committed-use pricing are excluded throughout.
The 20x gap at scale: at 100 TB stored + 100 TB egress/month the columns run from Backblaze B2 at $695/month to Google Cloud Storage at $14,000, with AWS S3 at $11,300 and Cloudflare R2 at $1,500. GCS and S3 are dear for the same reason — egress at $0.12/GB and $0.09/GB with no allowance against it. B2 is cheapest, and not because of a CDN: every row here egresses 1x what it stores, inside B2’s 3x allowance, so it pays nothing to serve that with no partner in front of it. The lesson: storage pricing is a rounding error; egress pricing is the entire bill.
Past 3x, B2 starts billing: the allowance is a multiple of what you store, so a read-heavy workload can leave it. 10 TB egress against 1 TB stored: 3 TB free, 7 TB billed at $0.01/GB, $76.95/month all in — past Cloudflare R2 at $15, which charges nothing for egress at any ratio. The two cross at about 3.8x egress-to-storage: below it B2 is cheaper, above it R2 is. Egress through Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net or another Backblaze partner CDN is unmetered, which removes the 3x ceiling entirely.
The operations trap: API operations (GET, PUT, LIST, DELETE) are the silent third cost dimension. S3: $0.005/1K PUT, $0.0004/1K GET. An import job uploading 10M small files costs $50 in operations alone. At 100M reads/month, that’s $40 on top of storage + egress. R2 includes 10M free reads, then $0.36/million. For high-throughput APIs serving millions of small files, operations can exceed storage costs.
The S3 Egress Tax
AWS S3 egress charges are the #1 developer bill shock story on Hacker News. “Why did AWS charge me $1,000 for an empty bucket?” is a meme. Here’s why.
6 billing dimensions most developers don’t know about: 1. Storage: $0.023/GB/month (Standard). Varies by storage class (IA, Glacier, Deep Archive). 2. Egress: $0.09/GB for data leaving AWS. The big one. First 100 GB/month free (for 12 months only). 3. PUT/POST requests: $0.005 per 1,000 requests. Uploads, copies, multipart initiations. 4. GET/HEAD requests: $0.0004 per 1,000. Every file download, every HEAD check. 5. Lifecycle transitions: Moving objects between storage classes (Standard → IA, IA → Glacier) incurs per-object transition fees. 6. NAT Gateway: The hidden dimension. EC2 instances in private subnets accessing S3 through a NAT Gateway pay $0.045/GB for data processing — and this charge appears on your EC2 bill, not your S3 bill. It’s invisible unless you know to look.
The NAT Gateway trap in detail: If your app runs on EC2 in a private VPC and accesses S3 through a NAT Gateway, you pay $0.045/GB for NAT data processing plus $0.09/GB for S3 egress = $0.135/GB total. The fix is an S3 VPC Gateway Endpoint (free), but most developers don’t know it exists because the NAT charge is buried in the EC2 cost explorer, not the S3 one. This single misconfiguration generates more surprise AWS bills than any other S3 issue.
The R2 disruption: Cloudflare launched R2 with a radical proposition: zero egress fees, forever. This wasn’t a promotion — it’s the business model. Cloudflare monetizes R2 through storage ($0.015/GB) and operations, not bandwidth. The result: at 1 TB/month egress, R2 saves $92 over S3. At 50 TB/month, R2 saves $4,500. This forced AWS to introduce free cross-region replication and reduced some egress tiers, but the core $0.09/GB egress remains. B2 and Tigris adopted the same zero-egress playbook.
Minimum storage duration charges: S3 Infrequent Access: 30-day minimum. S3 Glacier: 90-day minimum. Upload a file, delete it next day — you still pay for the full period. Azure Cool tier: 30-day minimum. GCS Nearline: 30 days, Coldline: 90 days. This catches teams using tiered storage for build artifacts, temp uploads, or short-lived files.
Best for Each Use Case
Recommendations by Use Case
Largest trial capacity → Storj
25 GB storage free for 30 days, no credit card. Decentralized, encrypted, S3-compatible. This is a trial and not a free tier: once it ends, a $5 minimum monthly fee applies, so plan an exit or a budget before you load data into it.
Best for startups → Cloudflare R2
Zero egress fees from day one. 10 GB free, S3-compatible. Start free, scale to terabytes without egress surprises. The zero-egress model means your storage costs are predictable at any scale — the #1 concern for startups watching burn rate.
Best for bandwidth-heavy apps → Cloudflare R2
Streaming, downloads, media delivery: these workloads are 90% egress cost, and they are the case where egress out-runs storage by a wide multiple. R2 eliminates egress entirely at any ratio, which is why it wins here rather than B2 — B2’s allowance is 3x what you store, so a 100 GB library serving 50 TB/month is billed for 49.7 TB of it. Put a partner CDN in front of B2 and that goes away too, but R2 needs no such arrangement. At 50 TB/month egress, either saves $4,500+ vs S3.
Best S3 drop-in replacement → Backblaze B2
S3-compatible API, cheapest storage of the four majors at $6.95/TB/30-day, and free egress up to 3x what you store with no CDN in the path. Change the endpoint URL and credentials — your existing S3 code works unchanged. At every scenario in the table above it is also the cheapest column outright, $695/month against R2’s $1,500 at 100 TB. Stable indie company with a track record of not removing free tiers.
Best for media/images → Cloudinary
25 credits/month covering transforms, storage, and delivery. 100+ real-time image/video transformations. Auto-format optimization (WebP, AVIF). Not general object storage, but irreplaceable for media-heavy apps that need on-the-fly optimization.
Best self-hosted → MinIO
Open-source, S3-compatible, enterprise-grade. Single binary, runs on any infrastructure. The industry standard for organizations that need full control over their storage infrastructure and data sovereignty.
Best for side projects / personal sites → Cloudflare R2
R2: 10 GB free with zero egress, permanently. S3-compatible. For personal projects that might go viral (HN front page, Reddit), zero-egress insurance prevents surprise bills. Storj is S3-compatible too but its 25 GB runs for 30 days only, which is the wrong shape for a site you intend to leave up.
Best for enterprise (compliance, multi-region) → AWS S3
The most expensive option at scale, but the deepest integration with analytics (Athena), ML (SageMaker), serverless (Lambda), compliance tools (Macie), and multi-region replication. Choose S3 when you need the AWS ecosystem, not just storage.
Best for global edge distribution → Tigris
5 GB free with automatic global distribution on Fly.io’s edge network. Zero egress. S3-compatible. Best for globally distributed apps needing low-latency object access without manual CDN configuration.
Hidden Costs and Gotchas
AWS S3: NAT Gateway charges appear on your EC2 bill
EC2 instances in private subnets accessing S3 through a NAT Gateway pay $0.045/GB for data processing. This charge is billed under EC2, not S3, making it invisible in S3 cost breakdowns. Fix: use an S3 VPC Gateway Endpoint (free). This single misconfiguration generates more surprise AWS bills than any other S3 issue. At 1 TB/month through NAT: $45 in hidden charges on top of the $90 egress fee.
AWS S3: free tier expires after 12 months
S3’s 5 GB free tier is part of the 12-month AWS Free Tier, not Always Free. After 12 months, you pay from the first byte. This catches developers who set up a project during the trial and forget about it. Azure Blob Storage has the same 12-month trap. GCS and Oracle are Always Free.
Cloudflare R2: no SLA on free tier
R2’s free tier has no uptime guarantee or support. Paid tiers ($0.015/GB storage, still zero egress) come with an SLA. For production workloads needing guaranteed availability, budget for the paid plan. That said, R2 runs on Cloudflare’s infrastructure with strong practical reliability. Also: R2 has fewer regions than S3 and no built-in lifecycle rules (yet).
Backblaze B2: free egress is capped at 3x what you store
The free direct allowance is a multiple of what you store, not a fixed daily cap: every B2 account gets free egress up to 3x its average monthly storage, and $0.01/GB after that. Store 1 TB and 3 TB/month leaves free with no CDN in front. A partner CDN — Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net, CacheFly and others — makes egress unmetered, which is an extension of that allowance rather than the only route to one. The workload this catches is read-heavy: a 100 GB archive serving 1 TB/month is at 10x and pays for 700 GB of it.
Cloudinary: credit system is confusing
1 credit ≠ 1 GB in all cases. Credits cover transformations, storage, and bandwidth, but different operations consume credits at different rates. Video transformations cost 2x. AI-based transformations (background removal, face detection) cost more. The 25 credits/month sounds generous until you discover a single video transformation pipeline can burn through credits in hours.
GCS: early delete charges on Nearline/Coldline
Nearline: 30-day minimum storage per object. Coldline: 90-day minimum. Archive: 365-day minimum. Delete a Coldline object after 10 days and you still pay for 90 days. S3 has the same pattern (IA: 30 days, Glacier: 90 days). This catches teams using tiered storage for short-lived files.
Self-hosted: ops cost is real
MinIO is free software, but running it in production requires: server infrastructure, monitoring, backup strategy, disaster recovery, security patching, and on-call. A 3-node MinIO cluster on bare metal costs $300-600/month in infrastructure + engineering time. For small teams, the TCO often exceeds managed services. Self-hosting makes economic sense at 50+ TB.
Pricing Change Timeline
Recent storage and object storage pricing changes tracked in our index.
Date
Provider
Change
Impact
effective Oct 7, 2026
AWS
AWS Proton end of support. Infrastructure-as-code provisioning service being retired. All environments, services, and templates will stop working. Source ↗
MEDIUM
effective Sep 30, 2026
AWS
AWS App Mesh end of support. Service mesh for ECS/EKS being fully retired. All configurations, virtual nodes, and routes will stop functioning. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 10, 2026 · effective date unknown
Pinecone
The Starter plan is still available as a free tier. The details have been expanded. The page now lists specific example workloads and their estimated usage within the Starter plan. It also details pricing for exceeding the free tier limits for various components like storage, write units, read units, egress, and assistant features. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 10, 2026 · effective date unknown
Qdrant
The free tier now offers 1GB RAM and 4GB disk, down from 1GB cluster (which likely meant storage). Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 9, 2026 · effective date unknown
Storj
The free trial now includes 25GB of storage and 2 Object Mount licenses. The page details a $5 minimum monthly fee that is waived during the trial and for accounts paying in STORJ token. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 9, 2026 · effective date unknown
Fastly
The free tier now offers 100 GB of bandwidth, 1 Million requests, and 5 GB of object storage. The page details pricing beyond the free tier, indicating the free tier is a starting point and not necessarily a permanently free offering. Several other features like Compute, Websockets, and DDoS protection also have free tiers with specific limits. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
transfernow
The free tier now offers 5 GB per transfer and 100 GB of storage, with files available for 7 days. A 'Starter' plan with 10 GB per transfer and 100 GB of storage for 3 EUR/month has also been added. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
Chroma
The free tier has changed. The current pricing page shows a Starter plan with $5 in free credits and usage-based pricing for writes, storage, and queries. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
Foursquare
The Spatial Desktop Basic plan is $0/month through 2026, includes $1 of agent tokens, 3 GB of cloud storage, and 5 shared projects. The Places API free tier is now 10,000 free calls on Pro endpoints. The pricing for Pro and Premium endpoints has been updated with specific CPMs based on call volume. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 7, 2026 · effective date unknown
Vercel
The Hobby plan still exists, but several limits have been adjusted or are now pay-as-you-go. Edge Requests are now 1M included / month, then starting at $2 per 1M. Fast Data Transfer is 100 GB / month included, then starting at $0.15 per GB. Blob Storage is 1 GB / month included, then $0.023 per GB. Image Transformations are 5K / month included, then starting at $0.05 per 1K. Function Invocations are 1M / month included, then starting at $0.60 per 1M. Active CPU is 4 hours / month included, then starting at $0.128 per hour. Provisioned Memory is 360 GB-hrs / month included, then starting at $0.0106 per GB-hr. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 5, 2026 · effective date unknown
Cloudflare Queues
The free tier now offers 10,000 operations/day, and the paid tier offers 1,000,000 operations/month. Message retention on the free tier is 24 hours (non-configurable), while the paid tier offers 4 days default, configurable up to 14 days. The pricing model is now based on operations (64KB chunks of data written, read, or deleted) with additional costs per million operations beyond the included allowance. Source ↗
HIGH
discovered Sep 5, 2026 · effective date unknown
ImageKit
The free tier now offers 3 GB of DAM storage and 500 video units instead of 20 GB storage and 1,000 video processing units. Bandwidth is 20 GB. Source ↗
HIGH
Data Source
How we track this data: the tables on this page were compiled by hand from vendor pricing pages. They do not come from the catalogue behind our search and MCP tools. Prices and limits are for free tiers only — paid tier comparisons use publicly available list prices. Compiled 2026-04-03, last checked 2026-08-27. Check data freshness.
A source check reads each cited page for that service's name and a price; the figures in the tables above are from our own records.
AWS — We read that on 2026-09-05 from aws.amazon.com/free, and our check recorded: the page names AWS as "aws" and states "$200"
Cloudinary — We read that on 2026-09-05 from cloudinary.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Cloudinary as "cloudinary" and states "$0"
Firebase — We read that on 2026-09-07 from firebase.google.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Firebase as "firebase" and states "$300"
gumlet.com — We read that on 2026-09-03 from gumlet.com, and our check recorded: the page names gumlet.com, renders no terms we can read, and its markup states 1 typed price (USD 6)
ImageKit — We read that on 2026-09-05 from imagekit.io/plans, and our check recorded: the page names ImageKit as "imagekit" and states "$0"
MinIO — We read that on 2026-09-09 from min.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names MinIO, renders no terms we can read, and its markup states 1 typed price (AIStor Free USD 0)
Pinata IPFS — We read that on 2026-09-07 from pinata.cloud/pricing, and our check recorded: the page writes "pinata", the domain we cite Pinata IPFS from, and states "$0"
Storj — We read that on 2026-09-09 from storj.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Storj as "storj" and states "$7"
Vercel — We read that on 2026-09-07 from vercel.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Vercel as "vercel" and states "$0"
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best free storage service in 2026?
We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 55 Storage services in our catalogue, each with the free tier terms and the date we last verified them. This page compares them on free tier limits, what each charges past them, and lock-in risk; the table above carries the figures side by side. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.
Which storage free tier is most generous?
Free tier generosity varies by use case. Some providers offer more storage, others more compute or API calls. Our comparison table above shows exact limits side-by-side so you can evaluate based on what matters most for your workload.
How do storage free tiers compare on limits?
Each provider structures free tier limits differently — some cap storage, others cap requests or compute hours. Our comparison table provides exact numbers for each provider. Check the growth cost analysis section to understand what you'll pay when you exceed free tier limits.