The egress maths is brutal for S3. CloudFront's new flat-rate plans close a lot of the gap, but R2 is still about five times cheaper for public files.
Use it when
- Media, downloads and assets served publicly at volume.
Don't use it when
- Data processed inside AWS: reading from private subnets through NAT costs far more than S3.
- You need versioning, replication, Object Lock, archive classes or bucket policies.
- Australian data residency (no Australian jurisdiction).
Pricing
$0.015/GB-month, writes $4.50 per million, reads $0.36 per million, internet egress $0. Serving 20 TB a month from 2 TB stored: R2 ≈ $44 vs S3 + CloudFront ≈ $2,158 (or ≈ $228 on CloudFront's Business flat-rate plan).
Provisioning
Official Pulumi package · Official Terraform provider
Instead, consider
- Amazon S3 Data lakes and anything processed in AWS.
Where it fits
- A website, SPA or PWA: Pick 02.
Heavy media and downloads with zero egress fees.
Sources
Last reviewed by Nicolas Dao