Amazon S3 vs SeaweedFS at 10 TB/mo: the real monthly cost
TL;DR — Switch, but stay managed. At 10 TB/mo, Amazon S3 runs about $1,152/month; SeaweedFS comes to about $1,025/month — and that includes the real ops time to run it yourself. That's a 4% lower 5-year total cost and break-even in 39 months, so worth moving — but to a cheap-managed target, not a self-hosted one.
The monthly bill, side by side
| Line | Amazon S3 (AWS) | SeaweedFS |
|---|---|---|
| Storage (10 TB) | $230 | $225 |
| Egress (10 TB/mo) | $922 | $0 |
| Ops / management (you run it) | included | $800 |
| Monthly total | $1,152 | $1,025 |
The line most "self-hosting saves 90%" posts hide. The $800/month ops figure is real labor — patching, monitoring, capacity, backups and the 2am incident — not zero. It's included above on purpose; it's also the biggest risk in this move. If you can't reliably staff it, a cheap-managed target like Cloudflare R2 or Backblaze B2 captures most of the saving with none of the pager.
Break-even & 5-year total cost
Moving costs a one-time $5,000 (data transfer + cutover). At $127/month saved, that pays back in 39 months.
| 5-year total cost (incl. ops + migration) | Amazon S3 | SeaweedFS |
|---|---|---|
| Over 60 months | $69,096 | $66,500 |
| Difference | $2,596 lower (4%) on SeaweedFS | |
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.
- SeaweedFS runs on flat-rate Hetzner SX boxes with unlimited traffic included; ops labor is priced in, never assumed free.
- Vendor list prices (storage, egress) are estimated 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.
- No ops capacity — if nobody can own the $800/month of labor, don't self-host; take the cheap-managed option instead.
- 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 Cloudflare R2 · vs Backblaze B2.
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/
- SeaweedFS (Apache-2.0 OSS) self-hosted on flat-rate boxes; storage/transfer from OVH/Hetzner — github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs
- OVH / Hetzner — generous-to-unmetered traffic included with flat-rate boxes — www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/