Is Amazon S3 free? What it actually costs in 2026
S3 has no permanent free tier: new AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credits usable on S3 for 6 months, then Standard storage bills at $0.023 per GB-month (first 50 TB, US East) plus requests and transfer.
The S3 pricing page points to the AWS Free Tier: up to $200 in credits at sign-up, a Free plan that lasts 6 months, credits usable within 12 months. After that every GB stored, every request and every GB out is metered — GET requests at $0.0004 per 1,000.
What the free tier actually includes
- No monthly free allowance — credits only, for 6 months
- Standard storage $0.023 per GB-month (first 50 TB), $0.022 next 450 TB, $0.021 beyond
- Requests and data transfer out are billed separately
Where the wall is
Egress and request counts. Storage is cheap; a bucket serving files to the public pays per GET and per GB transferred out, which is why the alternatives compared here are chosen on egress terms as much as on storage price.
After that: Standard $0.023 per GB-month for the first 50 TB (US East, N. Virginia), $0.022 for the next 450 TB, $0.021 over 500 TB; GET $0.0004 per 1,000 requests; Glacier Instant Retrieval $0.004 per GB-month.
Can you self-host Amazon S3? Yes
MinIO runs the S3 API on your own hardware; Cloudflare R2 and Backblaze B2 are the hosted alternatives compared here, with no or low egress fees.
What it actually takes to run one yourself
Real RAM against the documented minimum, monthly cost, setup time, and the one thing that catches people out.
Self-hosting MinIO
Self-hosting SeaweedFS
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
Read from Amazon Web Services's own pricing and documentation on 2026-09-26 — 37 days ago. Vendors change prices without notice; confirm before you commit.