Amazon S3 vs Cloudflare R2 at 10 TB/mo: the real monthly cost
TL;DR — Move it. At 10 TB/mo, Amazon S3 runs about $1,152/month; Cloudflare R2 comes to about $270/month — and that includes the time to manage it. That's a 74% lower 5-year total cost and break-even in 2 months, so the numbers clearly favour switching at this scale.
The monthly bill, side by side
| Line | Amazon S3 (AWS) | Cloudflare R2 |
|---|---|---|
| Storage (10 TB) | $230 | $150 |
| Egress (10 TB/mo) | $922 | $0 |
| Ops / management | included | $120 |
| Monthly total | $1,152 | $270 |
Ops isn't zero, but it's light. Cloudflare R2 is still a managed service — the $120/month above is config and monitoring time, not running a cluster. The saving here comes almost entirely from egress that Cloudflare R2 doesn't meter the way AWS does.
Break-even & 5-year total cost
Moving costs a one-time $2,000 (data transfer + cutover). At $882/month saved, that pays back in 2 months.
| 5-year total cost (incl. ops + migration) | Amazon S3 | Cloudflare R2 |
|---|---|---|
| Over 60 months | $69,096 | $18,200 |
| Difference | $50,896 lower (74%) on Cloudflare R2 | |
The assumptions (so the numbers are honest)
- 10 TB stored and 10 TB/mo served — a content/media-library profile. Lighter storage shifts the storage line but not the egress story.
- AWS egress is the tiered rate from the egress breakdown ($922 at this size); storage at S3 Standard ~$0.023/GB-mo.
- Cloudflare R2 is priced from its public rate card; ops labor is priced in, never assumed free.
- Vendor list prices (storage, egress) are confirmed against current rate cards as of 2026-06-26; ops labor & migration are modelled. Your mix of request rates, regions and redundancy will move them — that's what an Assessment nails down.
When to keep Amazon S3 instead
- Low egress — if you serve a few hundred GB a month, the bill is small and a migration won't pay for itself.
- Deep in-region integration — data consumed by other AWS services in-region isn't paying internet egress; fix it with a free VPC endpoint, not a move.
- Spiky, unpredictable traffic that genuinely benefits from scale-to-zero and global presence.
Related
- What 10 TB/mo of Amazon S3 egress costs — the egress line on its own.
- Amazon S3 egress, every scale — the full by-size breakdown.
- Same size, other targets: vs Backblaze B2 · vs SeaweedFS.
Sources
- Amazon S3 Standard storage pricing — ~$0.023/GB-month — aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/
- AWS EC2/S3 data-transfer-out pricing — the $0.09/GB first tier and 100 GB free allowance — aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/
- Cloudflare R2 pricing — no egress fees (storage billed separately) — developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing/