What free egress means on the day you restore

Free egress can describe an allowance, a price, or a policy

Free egress can mean unlimited transfer at $0 per GB, a monthly amount tied to storage, a fixed account allowance, transfer bundled into a subscription, or a fair-use boundary with no published overage price. Those shapes answer different questions and should not share one yes-or-no field.

The denominator matters as much as the word free. A proportional allowance can use monthly average storage or active storage, while a fixed allowance can be scoped by account, Region, destination, plan, or active hours.

Backblaze, Cloudflare, and Wasabi expose the key differences

Backblaze B2 includes free egress up to three times monthly average storage and then publishes a $0.01 per GB overage. The allowance scales with stored data and converts cleanly to a dollar result above the boundary. [1]

Cloudflare R2 charges no internet-egress bandwidth for either storage class. The transfer line is unlimited at $0, but Class A and B operations remain billable, and Infrequent Access adds $0.01 per GB of retrieval. [3]

Wasabi treats egress at or below active storage as a good fit for its free-egress policy. Repeatedly exceeding that guideline can lead to limitation or suspension, and the vendor publishes no per-GB overage price. A calculator must stop at not published instead of turning the excess into $0. [4]

With the same workload, the arithmetic stops in different places

With 5,000 GB stored and 6,000 GB downloaded in one month, Backblaze B2 stays inside its 15,000 GB allowance, R2 keeps the internet-egress line at $0, and Wasabi crosses its 5,000 GB policy guideline by 1,000 GB. [1] [3] [4]

Only Backblaze and R2 produce a complete egress-dollar result from the published rules. Wasabi's excess has no published price, so the honest result is a visible policy exception rather than either a fabricated charge or a false zero. [4]

Fixed, bundled, proportional, and unlimited rules cover the full provider set

Fixed allowances behave differently from storage-linked allowances because adding stored capacity does not automatically increase them. Bundled allowances add another dependency: the subscription and its active time can determine how much transfer is included.

The table classifies every provider in the dataset by allowance shape. Each claim cell includes a source reference, and unavailable class-specific rules remain not published.

Unlimited transfer removes one line, not the whole receipt

Unlimited transfer removes the internet-egress line only. R2 still charges operation classes and Infrequent Access retrieval, Tigris charges retrieval on two classes and temporary Standard storage for Archive restores, Filebase charges operations beyond its allowances, and OVHcloud archive classes can charge retrieval. [3] [20] [21] [11]

Minimum-duration charges are also separate, but a read-only restore does not trigger them. Add a duration remainder only when the workflow deletes, overwrites, moves, or transitions an object early. [3] [4]

Treat an unpublished boundary as a decision risk

Treat an unpublished boundary as a decision risk, not a bargain. Wasabi's dollar overage, DigitalOcean Cold's destination-specific transfer paths, and OVHcloud Cold Archive's retrieval rate are not published in the checked official material. DigitalOcean public-internet egress is separately published. [4] [9] [12]

A backup plan should state what happens when a full restore crosses an allowance. If the answer is policy enforcement or an unpublished rate, the estimate should surface that condition and decline to compute a false total.