S3 price comparison, and would it make sense to create a pricing plan without or limited egress cost?

[DutchSNO]

I wanted to compare some S3 storage providers based on price. So I dove into Excel to made a comparison sheet.

This doesn’t include a feature comparison like linksharing, Object Mount, SOC2 certification, etc.

This is what I found based on the current pricing (8 September 2026).

Minimum Montly fee	-
Wasabi: Pay as You Go	$7,99
Backblaze: B2	$-
Storj: Standard	$5,00

Early deletion fee	-
Wasabi: Pay as You Go	Yes: 90 days (default) for customers using the Wasabi object storage Pay-as-You-Go (Pay-Go) pricing model.
Wasabi: Pay as You Go | documentation	Minimum Storage Duration Policy
Backblaze: B2	Not that I could find
Storj: Standard	Yes: objects have a minimum storage retention period of 30 days
Storj: Standard | documentation	Storj Pricing | Seamlessly scale with the open, affordable cloud.

Pricing per TB/month	-
Wasabi: Pay as You Go	$7,99
Backblaze: B2	$6,95
Storj: Standard	$7,00

Pricing egress/TB	-	-
Wasabi: Pay as You Go	$-	Free egress up to used capacity. Example: 100TB used == 100TB free egress
Backblaze: B2	$-	Free egress 3x used capacity. Example: 100TB used == 300TB free egress
Storj: Standard	$7,00

If you put everything in a calculator, it wil give you this result:

• Storj Standard can compete with Wasabi Pay as You Go plan, up to 14.14% egress of total used capacity.
• The more data you store on Storj Standard, when you exceed the 14.14% egress threshold the financial gap/difference only gets bigger
• Storj Standard cant compete with Backblaze B2 based on pricing

This got me thinking about the current pricing model. Would it be possible to lower the cost by reducing the feature set? Like no linksharing, not using the Storj hosted gateway, no Object Mount, etc.

This should unburden Storj from providing those customers access to a gateway, and thereby reduce network related costs (including the network related expansion factor). But this only makes sense when those costs are now mostly covered by the current egress pricing.

In other words, would it financially be possible (and profitable) for Storj to create a third plan (I don’t count the free trial plan as a plan) that only accommodate storage pricing and no egress cost? With the caveat that the customer have to host his own gateway or use uplink and don’t get access to the other software/web features?

Calculation without egress cost

Calculation with 1$ egress/TB

I know that hosting you own S3 Gateway (ST) isn’t free, but I’m sure somebody can spin this around by ensuring this gives the customer more security (because you manage the Encryption passphrase).

Maybe even SNO’s wouldn’t mind dropping egress cost even further or altogether for a plan like this if this increase the used capacity. Although I don’t know how to separate this kind of traffic from the other egress traffic without creating another satellite where you can opt-in to (or opt-out).

With or without Storj, I still need a decent internet connection. And switching ISP wouldn’t make sense for me anyway, because this also means I have to give up my fiber connection, so that’s definitely not happening. Other than that, in the Netherlands there is a big push to install fiber (or upgrade existing lines) and remove the old copper telephone lines. So in the Netherlands the slower connections are disappearing fast, but I believe in other European countries as well (there are probably exceptions).

Other than that, the current ingress/egress traffic is negligible as long you don’t circumvent the /24 rule by using VPN’s or other technical workarounds to get extra network traffic. I wouldn’t mind if Storj gives my ISP a run for its money .

I’m curious what others think about this and if it would even make sense, but maybe someone at Storj already considered this scenario?? Because they have a lot more data to put into a calculator then I have.

[Roxor]

Also take a look at the price calculator here.

I’m not sure if price is Storj’s problem: they have competitors who charge more… who have also attracted more customers at that higher price. Perhaps some potential customers don’t like the idea of how their data will be distributed? Or was Storj chasing too small of a market (Media and Entertainment) and pushing to be the most popular whitelabel/resold option would have been better? I don’t know.

[DutchSNO]

@Roxor

I’m not sure if price is Storj’s problem: they have competitors who charge more… who have also attracted more customers at that higher price.

I have seen several things in the company’s I worked for.

• Some managements base the decision on what Gartner put in a whitepaper
• Others want a product/brand they already know
• And you have people in management that only look at the price tag
• Some company’s want everything under one roof. Because it’s easy…

I don’t know what it would take to get into a Gartner whitepaper, probably a bit more than a bottle of scotch/wiskey.
The second one needs a lot of reasoning from people management trusts
Cost is easy . If it makes financially sense for Storj to come up with a pricing plan. Even a slower plan could do the trick if it lowers the storage/egress cost for Storj

[DutchSNO]

Found some time to dive into the network statistics and convert it in a more readable format
Storj Public Network Statistics

satellitename	Egress in TB (last 30 days)	Ingress in TB (last 30 days)	TB stored
ap1.storj.io	54,9810	533,6966	689,3690
us1.storj.io	5619,8997	77932,7205	45385,9324
eu1.storj.io	679,2245	5051,4694	6602,2215
saltlake.tardigrade.io	2,1208	4,8004	280,9536
Total	6356,2261	83522,6869	52958,4765
Average per day	211,8742	2784,0896	-

I grepped the bytes from the json and divided them by 1000000000000. So based on different interpretations, the amount in TB can be a little of but should be close enough.

My guess is these numbers include Select. Even with or without Select, traffic wise it is still not that much when you spread in over 30 days and multiple nodes/ISP’s. I’ve had months in the past where I pushed +150TB a month over my consumer internet connection (not Storj related).

There are currently 3805 active wallets. If this number correspondents with the amount of active SNO’s, would it really be a problem to lower egress payout rate to compensate for a lower consumer egress pricing? Even if people downsize the internet connection, wouldnt find the selection process a better node? Or maybe finetune the erasure coding and spread those parts out over more nodes to compensate for protentional slower connections?

While writing this, there are currently 27k up to 32k active nodes (depends per satellite). Somewhere around 5200 are currently full.

[Alexey]

@DutchSNO

Or maybe finetune the erasure coding and spread those parts out over more nodes to compensate for protentional slower connections?

This will inevitable increase the storage costs.

We offered the pricing with a 1x free egress, it wasn’t popular, because if you have a heavy egress you will pay the same, if you don’t - you will pay more. So, the current pricing when you pay for storage and egress separately is more flexible.

[hashbackup]

@Alexey

We offered the pricing with a 1x free egress, it wasn’t popular

That’s understandable because Storj also doubled the storage price. It’s not inevitable, it’s just what Storj did.

I’ll agree that price isn’t everything. But it’s one of the easiest things to evaluate, so it is important. For example, HashBackup has a feature to incrementally download and verify backup data on remote storage. In the default / recommended config, the whole backup gets downloaded once a month. Doing this with Storj doubles the cost vs competitors that don’t charge for egress. It takes only a few minutes for the customer to consider whether this is relevant for them.

[kaloyan]

It is possible that we come up with a new “Native” plan as suggested here. We’ll need some product work to decide how the plan enforced: on bucket level or on project level? And some engineering work to exclude S3/Edge services on the Native plan.

Not routing uploads and downloads through the Edge services will definitely reduce cost. So $5/TB for storage should be achievable, and even lower price for egress.

[DutchSNO]

@kaloyan

We’ll need some product work to decide how the plan enforced: on bucket level or on project level? And some engineering work to exclude S3/Edge services on the Native plan.

Not routing uploads and downloads through the Edge services will definitely reduce cost. So $5/TB for storage should be achievable, and even lower price for egress.

I just don’t know if customers are interested in something like this (maybe you have more insight in this). Do current costs come up with talks with current customers or potential new customers?
What I do know that there are businesses that only look at the pricing, because with larger volumes those costs are gonna add up very quickly what should make it easier to offset the cost for hosting you own gateway(s). Especially now with rising prices because of AI shortages or (trade) wars, every penny counts.
Maybe this would also a good match for AI related storage? I see a lot of buzzwords about that add competitors.

[Roxor]

The market seems to want S3-compatibility: for all the tooling that unlocks (and ease of changing vendors). Backblaze tried their own custom software too… and eventually caved and added S3 support when they saw adoption was so poor.

But I guess maybe some customers will run their own gateway to save a couple $/TB?

[alpharabbit]

I am a flatrate guy. Industry standard S3 with free egress is what sells to me. Nothing else.

[Vadim]

I think if storj will have also native plan it is good, because it will give possibilities to client to choose. And chois it what clients like.

[DutchSNO]

@Roxor

The market seems to want S3-compatibility

Correct, integration is everywhere. Even if you host your own gateway to save money (and a lot of network traffic for Storj)

@alpharabbit

I am a flatrate guy. Industry standard S3 with free egress is what sells to me. Nothing else.

I hoped that there would be a business case to make that is financialy viable for Storj. Who knows…

[hashbackup]

Why would a business bother with running a local S3 gateway to get reduced egress when they can get free egress with no local gateway needed from competitors?

Sure, it can have advantages, like keeping unencrypted data local. But if a business already has an S3 software stack they’re using, this is already taken into consideration. They’re either already sending unencrypted data to S3 and don’t care, or they’re encrypting it before sending it to S3, and don’t care about a gateway encrypting it again.

Hosting a local gateway that is going to contact thousands of different IPs all over the world is probably going to give a business’s security team a heart attack. They’ll likely just say “No, we’re not doing that”. Who wants to configure that firewall?

[Vadim]

I think we need S3 nodes, that will convert it all to native. Then price will drop. But it need trust, some decisions, development, when it will be done, storj will not almost not care how clients gives their data.

[DutchSNO]

@hashbackup

Why would a business bother with running a local S3 gateway to get reduced egress when they can get free egress with no local gateway needed from competitors?

It depends how much egress traffic you create and if Storj can make a financial plan that makes sense for both sides. With 0 egress, Backblaze and Storj are going toe to toe. Storj can match Wasabi up to 14,14% of used capacity (unless I’m wrong). Everything above that Storj is losing based on pricing. But you can undercut both if you can come up with a plan that makes sense for Storj and the customer.

@hashbackup

that is going to contact thousands of different IPs all over the world is probably going to give a business’s security team a heart attack

And yes, the network engineers are gone have a bad day when they see those connections. But most of the time this should be manageable with DMZ, firewalls, micro segmentation (like NSX) or reverse proxy’s. Maybe not for the smaller customers like small businesses. But I think those business don’t have the data volume dat makes it easy to offset hosting your own gateway, I’m almost certain dat most small business don’t have a network engineer or enterprise level firewalls that can handle all those connections (there are always exceptions).

[DutchSNO]

@Vadim

But it need trust, some decisions, development, when it will be done,

Other problem is that you need a very high bandwidth connection, unless you can distribute it over a lot of SNO’s, ISP, s, etc.. And you need a router/modem that can handle al those connections. maxing out a 1gbit connection is easy, doing it without dropping a lot of connections/states is an whole other story (don’t ask how I know).

Make me remember something, didn’t have v2 network some kind of option to connect via a different SNO to the network in case a other SNO didnt have a public ipv4? Or do I confuse Storj with something else?

[Vadim]

Yes I meaned thet it will be lot of nodes, and storj play load balancer, this segment go to one, this to other and so one. no need event send whole file to one node, only segments.

[DutchSNO]

@DutchSNO

should be manageable with DMZ, firewalls, micro segmentation (like NSX) or reverse proxy’s

You can separate the gateway from the rest of the network, the only thing you need is a connection from the rest of your network to the gateway over a specific port.
In my case I put the gateway in its own vlan, that vlan can nothing but connect to the internet without any filtering.
To access the gateway, I created a FW rule with a source and destination and a specific port.

But there are more options to do things like this. But my homelab is not build for (old) enterprise network equipment or for something like VMware NSX/Nutanix Flow to play with.

[DutchSNO]

@kaloyan

Not routing uploads and downloads through the Edge services will definitely reduce cost. So $5/TB for storage should be achievable, and even lower price for egress.

I did some comparison for myself, without considering if it would financially make sense for Storj. But I think the only way to make it interesting for a customer to host its own gateway, is if Storj undercuts the well known competitors. I think $5/TB would only work when there are no egress costs (and maybe with a minimum guaranteed reserved capacity?). Off course there must be a limit like free egress up to capacity stored. After that the customer must calculate if it make sense to host the gateway themself.

I also mentioned, maybe there are other SNO’s who wouldn’t mind dropping egress payouts altogether if this results in more used capacity. I would not mind dropping it for a specific plan like this (lets call it the Public Select network ). Maybe something for a SNO survey?