Cloudflare R2 Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Quick answer (updated August 23, 2026): Cloudflare R2 charges for storage and operations but never for egress. Standard storage is $0.015 per GB-month, Class A operations (writes and lists) are $4.50 per million, and Class B operations (reads) are $0.36 per million. Every account gets a permanent free tier: 10 GB of storage plus 1 million Class A and 10 million Class B operations every month, with free egress on every storage class. Infrequent Access storage is cheaper to hold ($0.01 per GB-month) but doubles both operation rates ($9.00 and $0.90 per million) and adds a $0.01 per GB retrieval fee, so it only wins for genuinely cold data. Versus Amazon S3, R2 is far cheaper for egress-heavy workloads (free egress against roughly $0.088 per GB on S3); for a quiet cold archive that rarely moves, Backblaze B2 at about $6.95 per TB-month usually beats both. Rates below are verbatim from Cloudflare's official R2 pricing page, current as of August 2026.

Cloudflare markets R2 on one word: egress. There are no fees to move your data out, ever, on any storage class. That single line is why teams migrate off Amazon S3, and it is also why the R2 bill confuses people. When the biggest line item on every other object store disappears, the costs that are left over, operations and storage, suddenly dominate. And those are the ones nobody budgets for.

This is the arithmetic behind Cloudflare's R2 pricing page, current as of August 2026, with three real 30-day bills and the operations trap that generates threads titled "does Cloudflare really charge $9.00 for a single R2 request?"

Cloudflare R2 is an S3-compatible object storage service that charges for stored data and for operations, but never for egress bandwidth. That last part is the whole pitch, and it changes how you budget.

What Cloudflare R2 costs in 2026

R2 has two storage classes, Standard and Infrequent Access, and bills three things: storage, Class A operations (writes, lists, most mutations), and Class B operations (reads). Egress is free on both classes. Here is the full rate card, verbatim from the pricing page in August 2026.

Two details on that table matter more than the headline numbers. First, Infrequent Access halves your storage rate but doubles both operation rates and adds a retrieval fee. Second, Cloudflare rounds usage up to the next billing unit. Do 1,000,001 Class A operations and you are billed for two million. That rounding, not a per-request charge, is what the "$9 for a single request" threads are actually describing: on Infrequent Access, one million Class A operations cost $9.00, and if you trip one operation into the next million, you buy the whole next million.

The free tier covers more than you think

Every R2 account gets a permanent monthly free allowance on Standard storage: 10 GB stored, 1 million Class A operations, and 10 million Class B operations. For a side project serving a few thousand files, that is often the entire bill: zero. The free tier is why R2 feels free at small scale and then surprises you exactly when your writes cross one million a month.

Why your R2 bill is operations, not gigabytes

On S3 you learn to think in terabytes because egress is priced by the gigabyte and it dwarfs everything else. R2 removes that line, so the mental model has to change. Storage is cheap ($0.015/GB-month is $15 per terabyte). The bill is usually dominated by Class A operations, because every upload, overwrite, and multipart part counts, and they are the most expensive meter by far at $4.50 per million.

A useful reframe: R2 charges you for touching objects, not for holding them or for serving them. Hold a petabyte and read it a billion times over free egress, and you still only pay storage plus the read operations. Rewrite ten million small objects every night and the storage is a rounding error next to the Class A bill. It is the same trap as any usage-metered infra bill; we walked through the hosting version in our Vercel pricing teardown.

Standard vs Infrequent Access: when IA actually wins

Infrequent Access looks cheaper because the storage rate is a third lower. It is a trap for the wrong workload. IA doubles Class A operations to $9.00 per million, doubles Class B to $0.90 per million, adds a $0.01/GB retrieval fee, and charges a 30-day minimum storage duration even if you delete an object after a day.

IA wins only when data is genuinely cold: written once, read rarely, kept for at least a month. Think compliance archives, old backups, raw logs you might never touch. The moment a workload writes often or reads often, IA costs more than Standard, not less. Bill 3 below shows exactly how badly that goes.

Three real 30-day bills

Prices are the August 2026 rate card. S3 comparison figures use the widely cited economics from Last Week in AWS: roughly $0.023/GB-month S3 Standard storage and about $0.088/GB egress ($23 and $90 per terabyte). AWS rates vary by region and tier, so confirm current numbers on the AWS S3 pricing page.

Bill 1: an image and asset host (egress-heavy)

A SaaS storing user uploads: 100 GB stored, 5 million writes a month, 40 million reads a month, and 2 TB served to browsers.

• Storage: (100 - 10 free) = 90 GB x $0.015 = $1.35
• Class A: (5M - 1M free) = 4M x $4.50 = $18.00
• Class B: (40M - 10M free) = 30M x $0.36 = $10.80
• Egress (2 TB): $0.00
• R2 total: about $30.15/month

The same workload on S3: about $2.30 storage, plus roughly $171 in egress on the 2 TB (after the first 100 GB free), plus request fees on top. Call it $173-plus before requests. The R2 bill is about $30, the S3 bill is about $175, and the entire $145 gap is one line: egress. On R2 that line is zero, so your cost collapses to operations.

Bill 2: a cold backup (write-once, rarely read)

A 2 TB offsite backup: 2,000 GB stored, 50,000 writes, 200,000 reads, 50 GB pulled back in a month.

Here is the honest part: R2 is not the cheapest place to park cold data. Backblaze B2 stores at $6.95 per terabyte-month (about $0.007/GB), keeps Class A/B/C transactions free, and only bills egress past three times your stored volume. For a 2 TB archive that rarely moves, B2 is less than half the price of R2 Standard. R2 earns its premium when egress is uncapped and unpredictable; for a quiet backup it is not the low bidder. If your files live behind an app database instead, the same egress math drives Supabase's storage pricing.

Bill 3: a write-heavy pipeline (the operations trap)

A nightly job writing 3 million small objects a month into a 200 GB bucket, read rarely. Someone reads "IA storage is cheaper" and switches the bucket to Infrequent Access to save money.

• On IA: storage 200 x $0.010 = $2.00; Class A 3M x $9.00 = $27.00. Total about $29/month, and 93% of it is operations.
• On Standard: storage 200 x $0.015 = $3.00; Class A (3M - 1M free) = 2M x $4.50 = $9.00. Total about $12/month.

Switching to IA to shave a dollar of storage more than doubled the bill, because IA doubles the operation rate and this workload is nothing but operations. IA is for data you write once and barely touch, never for a churny pipeline.

Cloudflare R2 pricing per TB and per 100 TB

Per-gigabyte rates are hard to reason about once you are past a side project. Here is the same August 2026 rate card restated at terabyte scale, using Cloudflare's own billing unit (1 TB = 1,000 GB-months).

Storage is the predictable half. The half that catches people is that the write bill is set by object count, not by volume, because Class A operations are billed per request. Uploading exactly 1 TB costs a completely different amount depending on how you slice it:

Same terabyte, a hundredfold spread in write cost. If you are budgeting R2 and you only know your gigabytes, you do not yet know your bill. Get the object count first. Multipart uploads make this sharper still, because each part is its own Class A operation, so a 10 MB file uploaded in 5 MB parts costs two operations, not one.

Egress, ingress, and what "free" actually covers

Free egress is the reason R2 exists, and it is genuinely unconditional: there is no per-gigabyte data transfer charge on any storage class, at any volume, with no cap and no ratio limit. Ingress (uploading data into R2) carries no bandwidth charge either.

What is not free is the operation that moves the byte:

• Serving a file is free on the bandwidth meter and billed as one Class B operation at $0.36 per million. Ten million public downloads a month costs $3.60 in reads and $0 in transfer.
• Uploading a file is billed as a Class A operation at $4.50 per million, plus one operation per multipart part.
• Pulling data back out of Infrequent Access adds a $0.01 per GB retrieval fee on top. This is the only R2 meter that looks like an egress charge, and it applies to the IA storage class only, not to Standard.

So the honest framing is that R2 removed the bandwidth meter and kept the request meter. On S3, serving 2 TB to browsers costs roughly $176 in transfer alone. On R2 that same 2 TB costs $0 in transfer, and your only exposure is the read requests that delivered it. Rates confirmed against Cloudflare's R2 pricing page in August 2026.

Cache Reserve is priced like R2 but has no free tier

Cache Reserve is regularly confused with R2 because it uses R2 underneath and bills on the same three meters at the same rates. It is a different product with a different bill.

Identical rate card, one decisive difference: Cache Reserve has no free allowance and requires a paid subscription, while R2 gives every account a permanent free tier. Cache Reserve also only accepts assets with a freshness TTL of at least 10 hours, so short-lived content never lands there and never bills. Figures from Cloudflare's Cache Reserve documentation, August 2026.

The practical read: Cache Reserve is an extension of your CDN cache, priced per gigabyte you would otherwise re-fetch from origin. R2 is a bucket you write to deliberately. If you are trying to cut origin egress on a site you already serve through Cloudflare, Cache Reserve is the lever. If you are storing objects your application owns, that is R2, and it starts free.

Getting data in: Super Slurper and Sippy cost operations, not licence fees

Migrating off Amazon S3 is where most R2 bills start, and the two migration tools carry no product charge at all. Super Slurper (bulk copy) and Sippy (incremental, migrate-on-read) are both free to use. You pay only for the R2 operations they generate: every object Super Slurper writes into your bucket is a Class A operation at $4.50 per million, and every object Sippy pulls across on a cache miss is the same.

That makes migration cost predictable from one number you already have, your object count. Moving 5 million objects costs about $22.50 in Class A operations regardless of how many terabytes they add up to. What you should budget separately is the source side: S3 charges egress to get the data out, so a 10 TB migration off S3 costs roughly $880 to AWS and about $22.50 to Cloudflare if those 10 TB are 5 million objects. The expensive half of leaving S3 is the leaving, and you pay it once.

R2 vs S3 vs Backblaze B2 at a glance

Cloudflare R2, Amazon S3, and Backblaze B2 solve the same job with three different pricing philosophies.

The pattern: S3 is priced for you to stay (egress is the moat), R2 is priced to serve (free egress, pay for writes), and B2 is priced to store (cheapest bytes, capped free egress).

The cheaper-lever cheat sheet

• Egress-heavy (images, video, downloads, public assets): R2 Standard, no contest. Free egress is worth more than any storage discount, and R2 storage undercuts S3 too.
• Cold archive that rarely moves: price Backblaze B2 first. It usually wins on storage; R2 only pulls ahead if your egress is large or spiky.
• Write-heavy or many small objects: budget for Class A operations, not gigabytes. Batch writes, avoid tiny objects, and do not switch to Infrequent Access.
• Genuinely cold, read-rarely data: Infrequent Access, but only if objects live at least 30 days and reads are truly infrequent.
• Watch the rounding: operations round up to the next million. A job that trips just over a million pays for the whole next million.

R2's free egress is real and it is the reason to choose it. Just remember that removing the egress line does not make the bill zero. It moves the bill onto operations, and that is the number you now have to watch. Metered databases have the same shape: our Firebase pricing teardown shows Firestore document reads, not stored gigabytes, driving the entire bill.

Math check: the egress-heavy asset host costs about $30 on R2 versus about $175 on S3, and every dollar of the $145 gap is egress you no longer pay. Budget R2 by operations, not gigabytes.

Cloudflare R2 pricing FAQ

How much does Cloudflare R2 cost?

R2 bills three things and never egress: Standard storage at $0.015 per GB-month, Class A operations (writes, lists) at $4.50 per million, and Class B operations (reads) at $0.36 per million. A 100 GB egress-heavy asset host running 5 million writes and 40 million reads a month lands around $30 after the free tier, versus roughly $175 for the same workload on Amazon S3, where the whole gap is egress.

Is Cloudflare R2 really free?

It is genuinely free at small scale. Every account gets a permanent monthly allowance on Standard storage: 10 GB stored, 1 million Class A operations, and 10 million Class B operations, plus unlimited free egress. A side project serving a few thousand files often pays nothing. The bill starts the month your writes cross 1 million or your storage passes 10 GB, and Class A operations, not gigabytes, are usually what pushes you off zero.

Is R2 cheaper than S3?

For egress-heavy workloads, yes, and it is not close: R2 has zero egress fees while S3 charges roughly $0.088 per GB, so serving 2 TB a month costs about $175 on S3 and about $30 on R2. R2 storage also undercuts S3 ($15 versus about $23 per TB-month). For a cold archive that rarely moves, R2 is not the cheapest option, Backblaze B2 stores at about $6.95 per TB-month with free transactions.

Can I use Cloudflare R2 for free?

Yes, within the permanent free tier: 10 GB of Standard storage, 1 million Class A operations, and 10 million Class B operations per month, with free egress on every class. There is no time limit on the free tier, unlike S3's 12-month introductory allowance. Watch the rounding: operations round up to the next million, so a job that trips just over a million buys the whole next million.

How much does Cloudflare R2 cost per TB?

Standard storage is $15.00 per TB-month ($0.015 per GB-month) and Infrequent Access is $10.00 per TB-month, with egress free at any volume. Storage is only half the answer though, because writes are billed per object, not per gigabyte: uploading one terabyte as 10 MB objects costs $0.45 in Class A operations, while uploading the same terabyte as 10 KB objects costs $450.00. Get your object count before you budget, not just your storage volume.

Does Cloudflare R2 charge for egress or ingress?

No, on both counts. R2 has no data transfer charge for moving data out or in, on any storage class, at any volume, with no cap and no ratio condition. What is still billed is the request that moves the byte: a download is one Class B operation at $0.36 per million, an upload is one Class A operation at $4.50 per million. The single exception that resembles an egress fee is the $0.01 per GB retrieval charge on the Infrequent Access class, which does not apply to Standard.

How much does Cloudflare Cache Reserve cost?

Cache Reserve bills the same three meters at the same rates as R2 Standard in August 2026: $0.015 per GB-month storage, $4.50 per million Class A operations, and $0.36 per million Class B operations. The difference that matters is that Cache Reserve has no free allowance and requires a paid subscription, whereas every R2 account gets 10 GB plus 1 million Class A and 10 million Class B operations free every month. Cache Reserve also only stores assets whose freshness TTL is at least 10 hours.