Cloudflare R2vs
Backblaze
Backblaze: Cheaper per terabyte stored, with free egress capped at three times your stored data rather than uncapped
Cloudflare R2
S3-compatible object storage that charges nothing for egress to the internet
As of 31 August 2026, Cloudflare R2 has a free plan and paid plans start at $0.015/month. Object storage from Cloudflare with zero egress fees, which inverts the usual bill: you pay for what you keep and for how often you touch it, not for what you serve. Softwr lists it under File Storage. Cloudflare R2 is made by Cloudflare, available on Web, API.
Overview
What Cloudflare R2 does
R2 is an S3-compatible object store launched by Cloudflare in 2022 and run across its edge network. It speaks the S3 API, so existing SDKs and tools point at it with an endpoint change, and buckets can be attached to a custom domain or read through a Worker. Storage is billed per gigabyte per month, with separate charges for Class A operations (writes and listings) and Class B operations (reads). The distinguishing fact is egress: R2 charges nothing to serve data out to the internet. On AWS S3 the same terabyte served to users costs roughly ninety dollars in egress, which for media libraries, container registries, model weights, dataset distribution and public archives is the whole bill rather than a line on it. That single difference decides the workload, and it is why R2 wins media and distribution cases outright while looking unremarkable on the per-terabyte storage rate, which is higher than Backblaze B2 or Wasabi. Buyers are teams already inside Cloudflare who serve far more than they store, plus anyone who has been surprised by an S3 data transfer invoice. The trade-off is placement and tiering: you get a location hint and a jurisdiction restriction rather than a named region, and there is no deep archive tier under Infrequent Access, so cold data that would sit in Glacier for a dollar a terabyte has nowhere cheaper to go.
What people use it for
- Serving a large media or asset library to the public where transfer out, not storage, is the dominant cost
- Hosting a container or artefact registry that thousands of CI runners pull from every day
- Distributing model weights or open datasets that are downloaded far more often than they are updated
- Moving off S3 specifically to stop paying data transfer charges on a read heavy bucket
Related searches
The honest half
Where it falls short
Concrete and checkable, so you can decide whether any of them matter to you. This is the half of a review a vendor will not write about Cloudflare R2.
- There is no archive tier below Infrequent Access, so genuinely cold data costs roughly ten to fifteen times what it would cost in a deep archive class and there is nowhere cheaper to lifecycle it to.
- Class A operations are billed at 4.50 USD per million, so a workload that writes millions of small objects can spend more on operations than on the storage those objects occupy.
- Infrequent Access carries both a retrieval fee and a thirty day minimum storage duration, so data that is deleted or re-read sooner ends up more expensive than if it had stayed on Standard.
- You choose a location hint rather than a region, so you cannot prove to an auditor which datacentre holds an object unless you use a jurisdiction restricted bucket, and jurisdictions are limited.
- Support level follows your Cloudflare account plan rather than the storage spend, so a team on a low tier account gets ticket support with no storage specific SLA, and an R2 incident is a Cloudflare incident you cannot fail over from because the free egress only exists inside Cloudflare.
Cross-shopped
What people choose instead of Cloudflare R2
Each pairing was judged by two reviewers asking whether a buyer would genuinely weigh the two against each other. The ones that failed were deleted rather than published.
- Cloudflare R2vsWasabi
Wasabi: Flat per terabyte pricing with no operation charges, if your workload does many small requests
- Cloudflare R2vsAWS (Amazon Web Services)
AWS (Amazon Web Services): If you need lifecycle tiering into deep archive, named regions, and the wider S3 feature surface
Pricing
What Cloudflare R2 costs
Taken from the vendor's own pricing page. Prices move, so check before you buy.
Free tier
Free
- 10 GB stored per month
- 1 million Class A operations
- 10 million Class B operations
- No egress charges
Standard
$0.015 /mo
- Per gigabyte stored per month
- 4.50 USD per million Class A operations
- 0.36 USD per million Class B operations
- No egress charges
Infrequent Access
$0.01 /mo
- Per gigabyte stored per month
- Per gigabyte data retrieval fee
- Thirty day minimum storage duration
- No egress charges
Capabilities
Features
Zero egress billing
Serves data to the internet without per gigabyte transfer charges
S3 API compatibility
Works with existing S3 SDKs, rclone, and most S3 tooling by changing the endpoint
Worker binding
Buckets can be read and written directly from Cloudflare Workers without a network round trip
Jurisdictional restriction
Buckets can be pinned to the EU or to a FedRAMP jurisdiction for residency requirements
Infrequent Access tier
Lower storage rate with a retrieval charge and a thirty day minimum storage duration
Custom domain serving
A bucket can be published on your own hostname and cached by the Cloudflare CDN
Answered, with sources
Questions people ask
Each answer names the page it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.
Is egress really free, with no hidden transfer charge?
Yes for data served out of R2 to the internet. You still pay per operation for the requests that serve it, and if you pull data into R2 from another provider you pay that provider the egress on the way in.
How does the total cost compare with S3 for a public download bucket?
Storage is more expensive per terabyte than S3 Infrequent Access, but S3 charges roughly 90 USD per terabyte served. Any bucket that serves more than about a fifth of its stored volume each month is cheaper on R2.
Can I use R2 without using the rest of Cloudflare?
Yes, it works through the plain S3 API from anywhere. You lose the Worker binding and the free CDN caching in front of it, which is where a lot of the practical benefit sits.
Does R2 have a cold archive class like Glacier?
No. Infrequent Access is the coldest tier, at two thirds of the Standard rate plus retrieval fees.
Keep looking
Where to go from Cloudflare R2
- Cloudflare R2 alternativesEvery product people weigh against it
- Cloudflare R2 pricingPlans, floors and what the tiers exclude
- Cloudflare R2 badgesWhich rules it meets, and the figure behind each
- All File Storage softwareThe full category
- Best File Storage softwareThe shortlist, and how it was cut
Best File Storage software for
Compare Cloudflare R2 with
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- Backblaze
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- Scality RING
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- Nasuni
- TrueNAS
- Sync.com
- Storj
- Tigris
- Scality RING
- Panzura
- pCloud
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Softwr does not host reviews and shows no star rating for Cloudflare R2, because a rating we did not collect is not ours to publish. What is here is the pricing and platform detail from the vendor’s own pages, limitations we could state concretely, and alternatives a reviewer confirmed people weigh against it. Tell us if any of it is wrong.
More on Cloudflare R2
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Every tier, and where the cost actually lands
Compare Cloudflare R2
Put it head to head with anything we hold
Cloudflare R2 badge
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