What is the best object storage in 2026?

Backblaze B2 is the answer sysadmins give most often when asked for "the cheapest one that just works". It costs $6.95 per TB per month, billed by the byte-hour, so you pay for what you store rather than a tier. The first 10 GB are always free. And there's no minimum storage duration: delete a file after two days and you pay for two days.

Egress is free up to three times your average stored volume for the month, then $0.01 per GB. Store 1 TB and you can download 3 TB at no charge. Class A, B and C API calls are free; only Class D costs anything ($0.004 per 10,000), with 2,500 free calls a day.

One setting to get right on day one: your region is picked when you create the account and can't be changed afterwards. Pick EU Central if your data needs to sit in Amsterdam. On hosting forums, long-time users report years without issues at the lowest price they found without a minimum commitment.

Cloudflare R2 makes one promise: you never pay for egress. Whether files go out through the S3 API, a Worker or a public URL, outbound traffic is free. Standard storage costs $0.015 per GB per month, so $15 per TB, roughly double B2. But once you serve several times your stored volume each month, R2 becomes the cheapest option in this ranking.

The free tier is real and permanent on Standard: 10 GB-month, 1 million Class A operations (writes) and 10 million Class B operations (reads) every month. Past that, writes cost $4.50 per million and reads $0.36 per million. Here's the catch: listing a bucket counts as a Class A operation. Backup tools that chop files into thousands of small chunks can push the operations line past the storage line.

For EU data, R2 can guarantee that a bucket stays within the European Union jurisdiction. It doesn't support the S3 Object Lock API, though; it has its own bucket locks, so check your backup tool supports them.

OVHcloud is a French provider, and its Standard class doesn't charge for egress, ingress or requests. You pay for stored volume by the hour, nothing else. On 1-AZ (a single availability zone), a GiB costs about €0.0071 per month excluding VAT: around €7.10 for 1,000 GiB and €7.27 for 1 TiB. That's in B2's price range, with free egress on top.

The 3-AZ option copies your data across three zones for about €0.014 per GiB per month on the first 50 TiB, cheaper beyond that. For archives there's Infrequent Access (30-day minimum, €0.004 per GiB retrieved) and Cold Archive (180-day minimum). Users who moved off B2 describe it as easy to set up, and one compares it favorably with Hetzner on stability. The downside is a busier console and price sheet than Backblaze or Hetzner.

Hetzner sells object storage like a plan: €6.49 per month excluding VAT, with 1 TB stored and 1 TB of egress included. Extra storage costs €0.0087 per TB per hour (€5.85 to €6.47 a month depending on its length) and extra egress €1 per TB. Requests and ingress are free. For a 1 TB project, it's the cheapest price in euros here.

Data lives in Falkenstein, Nuremberg or Helsinki. You get up to 100 buckets, each capped at 100 TB and 50 million objects. Two details matter: the base fee starts as soon as a bucket exists, even an empty one, and objects under 64 KB are billed as 64 KB. Homelab users report rejected writes during traffic spikes and hitting the 50-million-object cap around 10 TB of small files, and Hetzner had object storage slowdowns across several sites in 2026.

Wasabi charges $7.99 per TB per month with no egress or API fees. On paper it's the simplest offer around. Two rules change that.

First, the minimum: Wasabi bills at least 1 TB a month, even if you store 100 GB. Second, duration: every object is billed for at least 90 days. Delete a file on day 16 and you pay 15 days of active storage plus 75 days of "Timed Deleted Storage". For backups that rotate every 30 days, that can triple your storage bill. Several admins describe finding this out after migrating, with bills as high as or higher than S3.

Free egress has a ceiling too: it has to stay at or below your stored volume. Serving 5 TB a month from 1 TB stored is outside Wasabi's policy.

IDrive e2 lists $6 per TB per month, the lowest price in this ranking. API calls are free, and egress is free up to three times your stored volume, then $0.01 per GB. Hosting forum regulars call its pricing surprisingly aggressive.

The flip side: IDrive bills a 1 TB minimum. With 100 GB stored you still pay $6, where B2 would cost about $0.63. Above 1 TB the gap works for it: 10 TB costs $60 a month against $69.50 on B2. IDrive lists endpoints in several regions; check the one you want on its endpoint list before you create a bucket.

Spaces is DigitalOcean's S3-compatible object storage. The $5 monthly plan bundles 250 GiB of storage and 1 TiB of egress, which suits a small app nicely. Past the bundle, storage costs $0.02 per GiB and egress $0.01 per GiB, and a cold tier costs $0.007 per GiB.

The bundle gets expensive as you grow: 1,000 GiB stored comes to $20 a month, about three times B2. Serving 5 TiB from 1,000 GiB adds about $41 of egress, for roughly $61 in total. Regions include New York, San Francisco, Atlanta, Toronto, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Singapore, Bangalore and Sydney.

Amazon S3 invented the API everyone else copies, and it's still the most complete service: many storage classes, lifecycle rules, events that trigger code, cross-region replication. If your app already runs on AWS, keeping files in S3 avoids paying egress between two providers.

It's also the most expensive here. We use the Paris region (eu-west-3) as our reference, since prices change by region: Standard storage is $0.024 per GB per month, $24 per TB. Requests cost $0.0053 per 1,000 writes and $0.0042 per 10,000 reads, and egress costs $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB each month. Serving 5 TB from 1 TB stored means $441 in egress alone. New accounts get up to $200 in credits, which covers a trial.