AWS vs Cloudflare
Both appear in 4 sections: compute, object storage, egress, footprint. Cloudflare is cheaper on 4 of 4 comparable measures.
The gap here is the clearest illustration of why egress pricing matters more than storage pricing. S3 Standard stores at $0.023/GB-month and charges $0.09/GB to serve data out after a 100 GB monthly allowance. Cloudflare R2 stores at $0.015 and charges nothing for egress, at any volume, to anywhere. On storage alone AWS is about 50% more expensive. On a workload serving 10 TB a month, AWS adds roughly $900 in egress and R2 adds zero. That single line is why R2 exists and why it is priced the way it is: Cloudflare already operates the network, so moving bytes to the internet is not a billable event for them the way it is for AWS. Operations are comparable, with AWS at $0.005 per thousand writes and $0.0004 per thousand reads against R2's $0.0045 and $0.00036. What AWS offers in return is depth: storage classes from Standard through Glacier Deep Archive, lifecycle policies, cross-region replication, object lock, and integration with every other AWS service inside the same network. If your compute runs in EC2, keeping storage in S3 avoids paying egress to reach it from outside, which usually settles the matter. If you are serving files to the public, or reading from outside AWS, R2's zero-egress model is not a marginal saving but a different order of cost.
Compute
All compute →Object storage
All object storage →Egress
All egress →Footprint
All footprint →| Metric | AWS | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|
| Regionshigher is better | 87 countries | — |
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