Cloudflare R2

What hackers pick instead

• Amazon S3A highly reliable, scalable object store with a simple, widely copied API that is cheaper than building your own, though its API has accumulated quirks and costs can surprise.170recommend
• Backblaze B2Cheap, S3-compatible object storage that pairs well with backup tools like restic. Critics report evening slowdowns and say it suits cold storage better than active use.50recommend
• AWS S3Durable, reliable object storage that people trust for files, backups and static sites; per-GB download charges can add up.17recommend
• Amazon S3 Glacier Deep ArchiveVery cheap long-term storage at about $1 per TB per month for data you rarely read back. Retrieval is slow and expensive, the caveat critics agree on.16recommend
• Wasabi object storagePeople recommend Wasabi as a cheaper, S3-compatible alternative to AWS S3 with no egress fees for reasonable use. One critic reports silent data corruption and distrusts it with storage.10recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 117 comments. Each links to the original.

1. There are actually a lot of cheaper S3-compatible services out there, (like Backblaze B2, or Cloudflare R2).

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Backblaze has stopped backing up your data”

2. I am serving models off Cloudflare R2. It is 1 petabyte per month in egress use and I basically pay peanuts

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Ggml.ai joins Hugging Face to ensure the long-term progress of Local AI”

3. Slightly higher latency. I've seen about 20-30% increase from S3 to R2. But the bill is magnitudes lower.

   Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

4. R2 also has very generous egress: completely free outbound data transfer with no bandwidth charges

   Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: S3(AWS) vs R2(CF)–Which is better?”

5. There's no egress data transfer fees, but you still pay for the GET request operations.

   Mixed · Nov 2025

6. Cloudflare's r2 which is basically S3 with no egress fees (as in no charge for reads)

   Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: Voiced, image-based D&D inspired AI-native RPG”

7. R2 is somewhat S3 compatible so it's less risky to use because I can swap providers

   Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work”

8. I was impressed to see how far I could get with the free tiers of these services.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Yamanote.fun – A complete soundscape for Tokyo's Yamanote line”

9. Cloudflare R2 also with no egress, all priced comfortably under S3 before egress

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past”

10. Well actually you do get charged based on operations like reading and writing.

    Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Show HN: Drakkar.one – Google Maps embed replacement, no API keys, GDPR-ready”

11. you avoid egress fees entirely and gain access to more than 300 edge locations

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Show HN: A WordPress plugin that rewrites image URLs for near-zero-cost delivery”

12. Images stored on Cloudflare R2 (zero egress fees = unlimited bandwidth)

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Show HN: Img-src – $5/month image CDN with on-the-fly transforms via URL params”

13. the free tier is already more than enough for a personal ebook library

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Bookshelf – Self-hosted eBook library that runs on object storage”

14. I've saved plenty of money by migrating from AWS S3 to Cloudflare's R2

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Cloudflare Email Service: now in public beta. Ready for your agents”

15. The zero egress cost is big and IMO their free tier is very generous.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Ask HN: S3(AWS) vs R2(CF)–Which is better?”

16. Cloudflare has some services that are really cheap (r2) to lure you

    Mixed · Jun 2026 · in “Cloudflare launched self-managed OAuth for all”

17. Cloudflare workers/pages/D1/R2 works great for me on the free plan.

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: How do you host your vibe coded tools/sites?”

18. Log volumes are low enough that its covered in the free usage tier.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Full-Text Search with DuckDB”

19. R2 has free egress, isn't it insane that they could pull that off?

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Cloudflare's AI Psychosis”

20. found that cloudflare has storage sooooo much cheaper than aws s3

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (June 2026)”

21. very useful for egress-heavy workloads for which it is ~free

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “I Just Want Simple S3”

22. Cloudflare R2 giving free egress allowed me to make it free

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Browsercord.com – free in-browser screen recorder and editor with share links”

23. No egress, and only like $.57 per million read operations.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Dropping Cloudflare for Bunny.net”

24. We use R2 (not affiliated) which doesn't have egress fees.

    Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Cloudflare K2: serverless event streams”

25. You wouldn't pay like anything for that on Cloudflare R2.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Trifold is a tool to quickly and cheaply host static websites using a CDN”

26. support was unhelpful in being able to explain anything AND took weeks to reply, and I had to move off R2 posthaste as it brought down production

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “S3 Is the Future, S3 Is the Past”

27. I briefly tried R2 and there were so many issues and absolutely no way to contact anyone at Cloudflare about it.

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Cloudflare R2 Outage (Sigh)”

28. R2 in particular has been the slowest / highest latency s3 alternative I ever had experience with

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “A super fast website using Cloudflare workers”

29. I would not trust any business on the assumption Cloudflare keeps their stuff available for free.

    Criticizes · Oct 2026 · in “Recipes Are Moving from Maven Central to the Code Genome Project”

30. free egress only until Cloudflare’s enterprise sales team sets its sights on your wallet

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Nvidia agrees to acquire Hugging Face for $13B”

31. it was impossible to contact anyone about the serious issues I had with the product

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Bunny Database”

32. R2 is very high latency with huge variance, definitely lower quality than S3.

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Oxy is Cloudflare's Rust-based next generation proxy framework (2023)”

33. Not even sure about R2 with it's unpredictable latencies.

    Criticizes · Dec 2025 · in “Amazon launches Trainium3”

34. there are egress charges to download R2 object storage

    Criticizes · Apr 2026 · in “EmDash – a spiritual successor to WordPress that solves plugin security”

35. all the other facilities CF offers such as R2 and D1 could be used with an email platform that could scale incredibly well

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Replicate is joining Cloudflare”

36. It seems regular reverse proxying and R2 still works, as we use those and seem to be working fine still.

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Cloudflare was down”

37. Much more pleasant figuring out how to use and configure it in Cloudflare than the craziness inside AWS.

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “I Just Want Simple S3”

38. offers free egress, and does not share their CDN product's fair use policy against image-heavy use

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight”

39. Globally deploying edge workers which have access to their many services (D1, R2, DO, etc)

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “VoidZero Is Joining Cloudflare”

40. At the point I'm running in CF anyways, I'd be far more likely to just use CF's R2

    Recommends · Apr 2026 · in “Show HN: Pushduck – S3 uploads that run on Cloudflare Workers, no AWS SDK”