Cloudflare R2 Pricing Explained: 1 TB Stored and 10 Million Reads

Cloudflare R2 prices storage by the GB-month, operations by the million, and egress at zero. One terabyte held for a month costs $15.21 after the 10 GB free allowance, and 10 million Class B reads cost nothing at all because the free tier stops exactly there (calculated 2026-10-25). That combination is unusual enough that the arithmetic is worth showing line by line, because the number that decides the bill is not the storage rate — it is which operations you are actually doing.

What each R2 line item costs

What the storage rate actually means

The storage charge is the only line that lands at this volume. Reading 1 TB as 1,024 GB, subtracting the 10 GB free allowance leaves 1,014 GB-months at $0.015, which is $15.21 (calculated 2026-10-25). Cloudflare's own worked example uses a round 1,000 GB and lands on $14.85; the 36¢ difference is the terabyte definition, not a rate difference, and it is the kind of thing that makes two quotes disagree.

Class B operations are reads, and the free 10 million covers a surprising amount of serving. A site with 1 TB of media and 10 million object reads a month pays nothing for access; reads only start to cost once they pass 10 million, at $0.36 per additional million. Class A operations — writes, lists, copies — are the expensive ones at $4.50 per million, with a 1 million monthly allowance that a backup job or a migration can exhaust in an afternoon.

Egress is free and unbounded, which is the line that makes R2 worth considering at all. There is no bandwidth component in the bill above, and there is no threshold after which bandwidth starts.

How we measured it

We loaded the R2 pricing documentation and the R2 product page on 2026-10-25 and took both storage and operation rates from them, then applied the free tier before the paid rate. The 1 TB figure is read as 1,024 GB and the free allowance is applied once, as a monthly credit. No bucket was created, no data was uploaded and no benchmark was run; the read volume of 10 million is the scenario, not a measurement.

What changes in practice

Infrequent Access is the trap for anyone who reads as far as the storage rate. It is $0.01 per GB-month against $0.015, which looks like a third off, but Class B operations cost $0.90 per million instead of $0.36 and the free tier does not apply to it. At 1 TB stored with 10 million reads, Standard bills $15.21 and Infrequent Access bills $19.24 before any retrieval charge, because you pay for all 10 million reads at the higher rate (calculated 2026-10-25). IA only wins below about 5.5 million reads a month at that volume, and data retrieval at $0.01 per GB adds another variable on top.

Rounding matters more than the rate at small scale. R2 bills the next whole unit: 1.1 GB-months becomes 2, and 1,000,001 operations become 2 million. A project storing 11 GB and doing 1,000,001 Class A operations pays for 2 GB and 2 million operations, which is more than double the free allowance it thought it had.

The last thing to plan for is the Class A count, not the storage count. Serving objects is cheap; rewriting them is not. A build that re-uploads 100,000 files a day runs 3 million Class A operations a month, which is $9.00 after the free million at $4.50 per million — more than half the cost of the terabyte it is rewriting (calculated 2026-10-25).

Bottom line

At $15.21 for 1 TB stored and 10 million reads, R2's bill is dominated by the storage rate and nothing else, which is the point: the bandwidth charge that usually dominates object-storage invoices is $0 here. Stay on Standard unless a terabyte is read fewer than 5.5 million times a month, and watch the write count rather than the read count.