Is Amazon S3 free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Storage is roughly $0.023 per GB per month on Standard, with cheaper tiers for infrequent access and Glacier for archives — cheap enough that storage is rarely the complaint. Egress is: about $0.09 per GB to the internet after the first 100 GB free per month, plus per-request charges. Moving 10 TB out costs close to $900. Figures checked 2026-08-04.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if your compute is on AWS. Transfer between S3 and EC2 in the same region is free, so co-location removes the only real complaint. Stay for the durability and compliance record, which is genuinely the best in the category and is not marketing. Stay if you need the surrounding services — lifecycle policies, Glacier, event notifications, cross-region replication — which the alternatives cover partially at best. And stay if your data is small enough that egress is theoretical.
What you are locked into
Structurally clever and worth understanding. The API is not the lock-in — it is a de-facto standard and half a dozen products implement it, so your code usually needs one endpoint change. The lock-in is the exit toll: the larger your bucket, the more it costs to leave, and the cost grows with exactly the thing that makes you want to stay. Anyone planning a migration should price egress first, because it frequently exceeds a year of the storage bill it is meant to save.
If you would rather not pay: MinIO
MinIO
The S3 API on your own hardware — same calls, no egress bill.
Free and open source. Commercial licence and support available from MinIO Inc.
See all 5 Amazon S3 alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Amazon Web Services before you commit. More object storage decisions on Macrostack.