Facts read November 6, 2026
Amazon S3 vs Cloudflare R2
Cloudflare R2 is Cuely's default storage pick when your description doesn't favor either one: s3-compatible storage with no egress fees. Pick Amazon S3 if you care most about compliance-heavy products.
Side by side
| Fact | Amazon S3 | Cloudflare R2 |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AWS's object storage, the reference S3 API. | S3-compatible object storage with no egress fees. |
| Free plan | New AWS customers get up to $200 in Free Tier credits; the first 100 GB per month of data out to the internet is free. | Free each month: 10 GB-month of Standard storage, 1M Class A and 10M Class B operations. |
| Paid from | Not stated | $0.015 per GB-month (Standard); $4.50 per million Class A operations. |
| At 1,000 users | $0/month | $0/month |
| Open source | No | No |
| Self-hostable | No | No |
| Best for | Teams on AWS; Lifecycle rules and archival storage classes | User uploads and public files; Large downloads where egress would dominate cost |
| Watch out | Internet egress is billed beyond the first 100 GB per month across AWS. | The free tier covers Standard storage only, not Infrequent Access. |
Where they differ
The published scores, from −3 to +3, that decide which one Cuely picks for each need.
| Need | Amazon S3 | Cloudflare R2 |
|---|---|---|
| high volume | −1 Egress fees grow with downloads. | +3 Free egress keeps download-heavy costs flat. |
| keep costs as low as possible | 0 No particular strength here. | +3 No egress fees and a 10 GB free allowance. |
| regulated or compliance-sensitive | +2 Mature controls: object lock, encryption keys, access logs. | 0 No particular strength here. |
| background jobs or long-running servers | +1 Fits AWS-based backends. | 0 No particular strength here. |
| global low latency | 0 No particular strength here. | +1 Served from Cloudflare's network. |
Sources: Amazon S3 pricing (read November 6, 2026), Cloudflare R2 pricing (read November 6, 2026). No vendor pays for placement.