Published 2026-04-03 · Reviewed 2026-09-13, corrections outstanding · Figures compiled 2026-04-03 · 26 of 26 figures in the “Pricing Change Timeline” table come from our records for 1,580 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 $81 in bandwidth alone — 1 TB less the 100 GB every account gets free each month, billed at $0.09/GB. R2 costs $0. This single difference has disrupted the entire cloud storage market.
Permanent Free is about the Free Storage column only: a tick means that storage allowance has no expiry date, a cross means it runs for a fixed term and then stops. It says nothing about the Free Egress column, which each row states for itself. AWS S3 gets a cross because new accounts get no free storage, only credits on a Free plan that closes after 6 months; but AWS S3 gives every account its first 100 GB of internet egress each month free, on an account of any age, aggregated across all AWS services and regions, so the 100 GB in its Free Egress cell does not expire.
Zero-Egress Object Storage
The most impactful category. Zero-egress providers eliminate bandwidth charges entirely — the single largest cost driver in cloud storage.
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 CREDITS ONLY
Free tier: no storage allowance of its own for new accounts. New accounts’ credits, up to $200, can pay for S3 while the Free plan lasts, at most 6 months. After that, standard rates from the first byte: $0.023/GB storage, $0.005/1K PUT, $0.0004/1K GET. Egress is the exception — AWS S3 gives every account its first 100 GB of internet egress each month free, on an account of any age, so the $0.09/GB rate starts at the 100 GB mark and not at the first byte. 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 $5/90-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)
No free plan since February 3, 2026: Cloud Storage for Firebase needs the Blaze plan. On Blaze, buckets in us-central1, us-east1 and us-west1 include 5 GB stored, 100 GB downloaded, 5,000 uploads and 50,000 downloads a month at no cost. Backed by Google Cloud Storage. Firebase Security Rules for access control. Excellent mobile SDK integration. 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.
Cost: Free single-node AIStor, under a commercial licence. The original AGPLv3 edition is no longer maintained, with no bug fixes or security patches. The most widely deployed S3-compatible object storage. Single binary, runs anywhere (Docker, Kubernetes, bare metal). Enterprise features: erasure coding, bitrot protection, encryption at rest, IAM policies, bucket versioning, cross-region replication. Active development with frequent releases. The default choice for any self-hosted S3-compatible storage need.
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, once you are past the allowance — AWS S3 gives every account its first 100 GB of internet egress each month free, on an account of any age, aggregated across all AWS services and regions. 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.
By 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 $81 in egress, which is 1 TB less the 100 GB every account gets free each month.
S3 has no free storage for new accounts; its monthly egress allowance stays
S3’s 5 GB of free storage was part of the 12-month AWS Free Tier, which ended for the last eligible accounts in July 2026. New accounts pay for stored bytes from the first one, from their credits while the Free plan lasts. The egress allowance remains: AWS S3 gives every account its first 100 GB of internet egress each month free, on an account of any age, aggregated across all AWS services and regions, so a project serving under 100 GB a month pays nothing for bandwidth. Azure Blob Storage’s 5 GB is free for the first 12 months only. 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
AIStor Free costs nothing to license on a single node, but running it in production still 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. It also needs a paid AIStor subscription (Enterprise Lite, price on request), since AIStor Free covers one node. 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 reaches end of support on 2026-10-07, when its console and resources stop being accessible. AWS: "Your deployed CloudFormation stacks and the resources they manage will remain intact and continue to function." New customers could not sign up after 2025-10-07. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Oct 4, 2026 · effective date unknown
SurrealDB Cloud
The free tier now includes a compute instance with 0.25 vCPU and 1 GB memory, but also lists several paid tiers with varying compute and storage options. The free tier is now explicitly a 'Start' plan with hourly billing for additional resources beyond the free limits. Source ↗
MEDIUM
effective Oct 1, 2026
Neon
Neon raised the Free plan's Postgres storage from 0.5 GB to 1 GB per project and added a limit of 20 GB across all of an account's projects. Source ↗
MEDIUM
effective Sep 30, 2026
AWS
AWS App Mesh reached end of support on 2026-09-30. AWS: "After September 30, 2026, you will no longer be able to access the AWS App Mesh console or AWS App Mesh resources." AWS points App Mesh users to Amazon ECS Service Connect. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 26, 2026 · effective date unknown
Nango
The free plan now has a 10GB/mo data transfer limit. Previously 100k custom function logs, 100k custom sync storage records, and 100k API webhooks. Source ↗
MEDIUM
discovered Sep 25, 2026 · effective date unknown
Penpot
The Professional plan is now $0/user/month but has unlimited teams and storage up to 25GB (previously 10GB). It also includes 90 days of autosave versions and file recovery (previously 7 days). Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Penpot's page, so it does not count toward the rating.Source ↗
HIGH
effective Sep 15, 2026
CockroachDB
CockroachDB stopped offering its free Basic plan (50 million RUs and 10 GiB of storage free per month) to new deployments on 2026-09-15, when it moved new clusters to Cockroach Continuum pricing. New Cloud organizations now get a 30-day free trial with $400 in credit. Clusters created before 2026-09-15 stay on their existing plans during their current term. Source ↗
HIGH
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. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Storj's page, so it does not count toward the rating.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. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of transfernow's page, so it does not count toward the rating.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. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Chroma's page, so it does not count toward the rating.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. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of Cloudflare Queues's page, so it does not count toward the rating.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. Unconfirmed. We could not check this change against an archived copy of ImageKit's page, so it does not count toward the rating.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. 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, except for the services whose entry below dates them to a read of the vendor's own page.
AWS — We read that on 2026-09-21 from aws.amazon.com/free, and our check recorded: the page names AWS as "aws" and states "$100"
Backblaze B2 — We read that on 2026-09-24 from backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Backblaze B2 as "backblaze b2" and states "$0". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-09-24.
Cloudflare R2 — We read that on 2026-10-03 from developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Cloudflare R2 as "cloudflare r2" and states "10 GB-month / month" and "10,000,000 reads per day". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-10-03.
Cloudinary — We read that on 2026-09-21 from cloudinary.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Cloudinary as "cloudinary" and states "$0". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-09-21.
Firebase — We read that on 2026-10-03 from firebase.google.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Firebase as "firebase" and states "20K writes/day" and "50K reads/day" and "20K deletes/day" and "50K read units/day". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-10-03.
gumlet.com — We read that on 2026-09-20 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 2026-09-22 from imagekit.io/plans, and our check recorded: the page names ImageKit as "imagekit" and states "$0". The terms above come from our read of 2026-09-05, and we have read the page since, on 2026-09-22, without confirming them.
MinIO — We read that on 2026-10-04 from min.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names MinIO, renders "Enterprise tiers" and no amount, and its markup states 1 typed price (AIStor Free USD 0)
Oracle Cloud — We read that on 2026-10-01 from oracle.com/cloud/free, and our check recorded: the page names Oracle Cloud as "oracle cloud" and states amounts, none of which we matched to the terms we publish. Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-10-01.
Pinata IPFS — We read that on 2026-09-24 from pinata.cloud/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Pinata IPFS as "ipfs" and states "$0". Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-09-24.
Storj — We read that on 2026-10-03 from storj.io/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Storj as "storj" and states "$7" and "$5" and "$5,"
Supabase — We read that on 2026-10-04 from supabase.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Supabase as "supabase" and states "$ 0"
Tigris — We read that on 2026-09-22 from tigrisdata.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Tigris as "tigris" and states amounts, none of which we matched to the terms we publish. Our stored terms were last confirmed on 2026-09-22.
Uploadcare — We read that on 2026-09-20 from uploadcare.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Uploadcare as "uploadcare" and states "$0". The terms above come from our read of 2026-09-03, and we have read the page since, on 2026-09-20, without confirming them.
Uploadthing — no catalogue record
Vercel — We read that on 2026-09-22 from vercel.com/pricing, and our check recorded: the page names Vercel as "vercel" and states "$0" and "100 GB / month" and "1M allowed requests / month" and "1 GB / month"
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. 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?
We name no most generous free tier here, because generosity is not one quantity: the columns above measure different things and a tier that leads one trails another.
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.