What 1 TB of Cloud Egress Costs: S3 vs Backblaze B2 vs Wasabi

Storage is cheap and egress is not. A terabyte of object storage costs a few dollars a month on every provider; pulling that terabyte back out over the public internet costs nothing on two of them and around $83 on S3.

The three numbers below come from the vendors' own pricing pages on 2026-10-25, including the free allowances that decide the final bill.

The egress bill for 1 TB of downloads

Where the S3 number comes from

AWS's S3 pricing page states the rate in a worked example: data transfer out from Amazon S3 in Europe (Ireland) to the internet is $0.09 per GB. The same page states that AWS customers get 100 GB of data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all AWS services and regions.

So a terabyte of egress — 1,024 GB — is 924 billable gigabytes, and 924 x $0.09 = $83.16. Move the workload to a higher-volume tier and the per-GB rate falls; move it to a cheaper region and the rate changes. The arithmetic, not the rate, is the part people get wrong.

How B2 and Wasabi avoid the charge

Backblaze B2 charges $6.95 per TB per month for storage and makes egress free up to three times your average monthly stored data. Store 1 TB and you can serve 3 TB of downloads a month for nothing; go past it and the overage is $0.01 per GB, so 4 TB of egress on 1 TB of storage costs about $10. B2 also waives egress entirely when the download goes through a listed CDN or compute partner — Fastly, Cloudflare, bunny.net, CacheFly, CoreWeave, Equinix Metal, Vultr and phoenixNAP.

Wasabi takes a different trade. It charges $7.99 per TB per month, includes egress and API calls at no extra cost, requires a 90-day minimum storage duration, and ties the minimum monthly charge to 1 TB of active storage per account. You pay more per stored byte than on B2 and get an unlimited download allowance for it.

How we measured it

We read the egress rules and rates straight from the three pricing pages on 2026-10-25 and did the arithmetic in the table above by hand. No transfer benchmark was run, so these are bills, not speeds. AWS renders most individual prices dynamically on that page, which is why the S3 rate quoted here is the one printed in AWS's own worked example rather than a region table we could scrape.

What changes in practice

Egress is a business-model tax, not an infrastructure cost. A media site, a public dataset mirror, or an API that returns large payloads pays it every month; an application that stores backups and rarely reads them pays almost nothing anywhere. That is why the same 1 TB costs $83 on S3 and $0 on Wasabi — the providers are pricing two different customer shapes.

Two clauses decide real bills more than the headline rate. B2's 3x allowance is relative to average monthly storage, so a bucket that shrinks in the middle of the month also shrinks its free egress. Wasabi's 90-day minimum means an export pipeline that writes and deletes daily still bills for three months of every object.

Bottom line

For read-heavy public data, Wasabi's flat $7.99 per TB with free egress is the simplest number to predict. For storage-heavy, read-light workloads, B2's $6.95 per TB plus a 3x egress allowance is cheaper. S3 remains the option you pick for the ecosystem, and it is the only one of the three where a popular download can turn into a bill with four digits.