Cloudflare comes with S3 competitor R2 Storage without egress fees

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Cloudflare starts its own cloud storage service for enterprise. R2 Storage primarily has to compete with Amazon Web Services S3 storage, especially on price. R2 costs 1.5 cents per gigabyte per month, and customers pay no egress fees.

The storage service is not yet available, Cloudflare writes, but interested parties can already register. An open beta will begin ‘soon’. Cloudflare markets R2 Storage as a counterpart to S3 from Amazon Web Services, but also from other cloud providers. In particular, the price is lower. For example, the standard storage price is lower than with S3; customers pay $0.015 per gigabyte per month for storage. The euro price is unknown.

The price for access requests will be dynamic, although Cloudflare does not have a price tag attached to it. Under a certain limit, it even becomes completely free. Cloudflare is talking about less than ten requests per second. More than that will cost money, but it is not known how much. Cloudflare says it finds it unfair that developers with other storage services pay the same price regardless of the number of requests they submit.

It is striking that egress fees disappear completely. According to Cloudflare, that is usually the largest cost item for companies, partly because the costs are difficult to predict in advance. There is no limit to egress bandwidth in R2 at all. Customers therefore have an unlimited request rate. In particular, by eliminating these costs, Cloudflare tries to set itself apart from AWS. That is not entirely unexpected. Cloudflare has repeatedly spoken out against egress fees. The company also previously started the Bandwidth Alliance, along with a few other hosting providers such as Alibaba. That foundation aims to reduce the variable costs of cloud storage. This includes, for example, a calculation tool to predict egress fees.

To facilitate migration from other cloud providers, R2 will be provided with various migration tools. For example, the service uses the S3 API for Object Storage. This allows customers of any storage service based on S3 to migrate their content.

Cloudflare guarantees 99.999999999% reliability. The service hosts files in multiple locations in different regions worldwide to ensure that reliability. That is only in the initial period. In the future, customers will be able to choose region-specific storage if they wish.

R2 is integrated with Cloudflare Workers. Users can therefore link a ‘worker’ to a specific bucket. The service also works with other Cloudflare products such as Durable Objects.

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