Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

How much does cloud storage cost per TB?

Cloud storage costs between $6.95/TB/month (Backblaze B2) and $23/TB/month (AWS S3 Standard) for backup-style object storage, before any egress fees. Consumer plans like Google Drive and Dropbox are priced per fixed tier rather than per GB, which changes the math once you cross a tier boundary. The table below shows monthly storage cost only (no restores) at four common amounts, using the same pricing data that drives the calculator above.

External HDD is shown as a monthly-equivalent cost (one-time purchase amortized over 36 months), not a subscription. See the external drive section below for the full comparison. Pricing last checked Jul 31, 2026.

AWS S3 pricing calculator: what does S3 actually cost?

AWS S3 Standard costs $0.023/GB/month (about $23/TB) for the first 50TB stored per month in the US East (N. Virginia) region, dropping to $0.022/GB for the next 450TB and $0.021/GB beyond 500TB. That tiered discount only matters at large scale. A typical creator storing 1-50TB of footage pays the first-tier rate the whole way.

S3 also has a cheaper tier called S3 Standard-IA (Infrequent Access) at $0.0125/GB/month, roughly half the price of Standard. The catch: IA charges a $0.01/GB retrieval fee every time you read a file, has a 30-day minimum storage duration, and a 128KB minimum billable object size. IA makes sense for an archive you rarely touch. For active project backups you're still syncing to, Standard is usually the better fit despite the higher storage price, because retrieval isn't free.

At 10TB stored, S3 Standard costs $230.00/month in storage alone ($2,760/year). Restoring all 10TB once adds $891 in egress, after the first 100GB/month free tier, at $0.09/GB for the next 9.9TB. That brings a single full restore year to roughly $3,651 total. (Source: AWS S3 pricing)

Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi vs Cloudflare R2: which is cheapest?

Backblaze B2 is cheapest for most Mac backup workflows: $6.95/TB/month with no minimum billing and free egress up to 3x your stored data per month (or entirely free through Cloudflare, Fastly, or Bunny.net via the Bandwidth Alliance). Wasabi is $7.99/TB/month with free egress up to a 1:1 ratio with stored capacity, but it has a 1TB minimum billing floor, so storing 50GB still costs $7.99/month, an effective rate about 20x higher than the headline price. Cloudflare R2 is $15/TB/month, the most expensive of the three for storage, but all egress is free, always, no ratio or multiple to track.

For upload-heavy, download-rare backup archives (the common case for Mac video and photo backups), B2 usually wins on total cost. R2 wins when you expect to download large, unpredictable amounts. Wasabi sits in between for large, predictable volumes above 1TB. These numbers are the same ones published in the full B2 vs Wasabi vs R2 comparison, sourced from backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing, wasabi.com/pricing, and developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing.

What does it cost to restore everything you've stored?

Restoring everything you've stored (a full disaster recovery, or just pulling an old project back down) is the cost most storage calculators skip. It only matters for providers that charge egress. Backblaze B2 gives you 3x your stored data in free downloads every month, so a single full restore is free unless you've already used that allowance elsewhere that month. Wasabi and Cloudflare R2 don't charge for a full restore either, under Wasabi's 1:1 fair-use policy and R2's always-free egress. AWS S3 is the exception: restoring 10TB costs about $891 on top of the monthly storage bill, at $0.09/GB after the first 100GB/month free.

This is the calculation most people forget when they pick a provider by storage price alone. If you're backing up footage you expect to need again (a client re-edit, a drive failure, a Mac replacement), model at least one full restore into the real cost, not just the monthly sticker price. The upload-time math for 1TB of footage covers the other side of this: how long the initial backup itself takes per provider.

Cloud storage vs. an external hard drive: which is cheaper long-term?

A one-time external HDD purchase is cheaper than any cloud subscription within roughly a year, and dramatically cheaper over five. A 5TB portable HDD costs about $27/TB to buy once (roughly $135, per current US pricing). Amortized over an assumed 3-year drive life, that's about $3.75 /month for 5TB, versus $34.75 /month on Backblaze B2 (the cheapest cloud option) for the same 5TB. The crossover point, where the HDD's one-time cost equals what you'd have already paid B2, lands within the first two to three months.

The tradeoff isn't really about price. A local drive has no ongoing bill but also no offsite protection: if your office floods or the drive is stolen alongside your Mac, a local-only copy is gone. Cloud storage costs more per TB but is inherently offsite. The standard answer, covered in how much backup storage you actually need, is to use both: a local drive for your fast, cheap primary backup, and a cloud destination as the offsite third copy in a 3-2-1 setup.