Guide
Cold storage is cheaper to keep and dearer to open
Prices checked · Vendor details further down checked
The coldest class at each vendor costs from $0.92 per TB a month (Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive) to $10.00 (Cloudflare R2 Infrequent Access), against $21.42 for S3 Standard. Reading 1 TB back from S3 Glacier Deep Archive adds $29.34 before any download, and the data is ready within 12 h.
| Coldest class | Storage per TB-month | Read 1 TB back | Ready to download | Minimum |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive United States (Northern Virginia) | $0.92 | $29.34 | Within 12 h | 180 days |
| Azure Blob Storage Archive LRS United States (East US) | $0.92 | $71.15 | Within 15 h | 180 days |
| Google Cloud Storage Archive United States (South Carolina) | $1.12 | $46.57 | At once | 365 days |
| OVHcloud Object Storage Cold Archive France (Paris) | $1.84 | $10.38 | Within 2 days | 4,380 hours |
| Oracle OCI Object Storage Archive United States (Ashburn) | $2.42 | $0.53 | Not confirmed | 90 days |
| Tigris Archive Automatic location | $3.73 | $0.50 | Not confirmed | 90 days |
| Vultr Object Storage Archive United States (New Jersey) | $6.00 | $0.54 | Not confirmed | None |
| DigitalOcean Spaces Cold Storage United States (New York 3) | $6.52 | Free | At once | 30 days |
 Cloudflare R2 Infrequent Access Automatic location | $10.00 | $10.00 | At once | 30 days |
Each vendor's cheapest class that charges to read data back or takes hours to make it ready, in its first listed region. "Read 1 TB back" is the retrieval fee, restore requests (1 TB in 100,000 files) and any temporary copy, before the download.
Put your own numbers through the calculator to see what this charge does to a normal month and to the month you restore.
Cold storage trades access conditions for a lower storage price
Cold storage is an object-storage class intended for data read less often than a hot or standard class. Its terms commonly change storage price together with one or more of retrieval price, request price, minimum duration, minimum object size, restore latency, or temporary-copy behavior. [1] [4] [6]
Cold does not mean one universal access speed. Some classes remain online and charge retrieval when read, while some archive classes require a restore or rehydration step before ordinary reads. The selected provider and class decide the workflow. [3] [5] [6]
Show the tableas checked 26 July 2026
| Cold-storage question | What to look for | Wrong assumption | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Is the object immediately readable? | Class-specific online, restore, or rehydration behavior [3] [5] [6] | Every archive label means the same delay | [3] [5] [6] |
| Is retrieval charged? | Numeric rate, allowance, not charged, or a note that the price is not published [2] [7] | Lower storage implies free reads | [2] [7] |
| Is there a minimum duration? | The selected class's object-level clock [2] [7] | A read-only restore triggers early deletion | [2] [7] |
| Does recovery create another copy? | Provider-specific temporary or online-copy behavior [3] [5] | Retrieval is the only recovery bill line | [3] [5] |
Ten of 18 vendors have 24 cold or archive classes
We found 24 cold, infrequent-access, glacier, archive, or archive-access classes across 10 of the 18 vendors. The other 8 vendors have no cold class among the offers we checked, and we do not assume one. [8] [1] [4] [6]
No applicable class means no separate cold class appears among the 66 offers we checked. It does not claim that a vendor can never launch another product. Storj sells no cold class: its price list, in effect since 1 July 2026, has Standard and Advanced, both read at once. [8] [20]
Show the table (18 vendors)as checked 26 July to 20 October 2026
| Provider | Cold or archive classes we checked | How many | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | Standard-IA; One Zone-IA; Glacier Instant Retrieval; Glacier Flexible Retrieval; Glacier Deep Archive; Intelligent-Tiering archive access [1] | 6 classes or archive-access entries | [1] [2] |
| Azure Blob Storage | Cool LRS; Cold LRS; Archive LRS [4] | 3 classes | [4] [10] |
| Google Cloud Storage | Nearline; Coldline; Archive [6] | 3 classes | [6] [7] |
| Cloudflare R2 | Infrequent Access [12] | 1 class | [12] |
| Backblaze B2 | does not apply to the B2 Cloud Storage offer we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
| Wasabi | does not apply to the Hot Cloud Storage offer we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
| IDrive e2 | does not apply to the IDrive e2 offer we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
| DigitalOcean Spaces | Spaces Cold Storage [13] | 1 class; the prices we checked include retrieval, public-internet egress, minimum object sizes, and early-deletion rules | [8] [13] [14] |
| Scaleway Object Storage | Glacier [15] | 1 class | [15] |
| OVHcloud Object Storage | Infrequent Access; Active Archive; Cold Archive [16] | 3 classes | [16] [17] |
| Hetzner Object Storage | does not apply to the Object Storage offer we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
| Akamai Cloud Object Storage | does not apply to the Object Storage offer we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
| Vultr Object Storage | Archive [18] | 1 class; retrieval price and latency remain not published | [18] [19] |
| Storj | does not apply to the Standard price we checked [8] | No separate cold class. Since 1 July 2026, Standard costs $7 per TB a month to store and $7 per TB to download; Advanced costs $10 per TB to store and $7 per TB to download [20] | [8] [20] |
| Oracle OCI Object Storage | Infrequent Access; Archive [21] | 2 classes | [21] [22] |
| Tigris | Infrequent Access; Archive; Archive Instant Retrieval [23] | 3 classes | [23] |
| Filebase | does not apply to the Object Storage offer we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
| Telnyx Cloud Storage | does not apply to the Regular Storage offers we checked [8] | No separate cold class | [8] |
Cold storage pays off only if the whole restore, bill and wait, still works for you
A cold-class comparison should list storage, retrieval, requests, minimum duration, minimum object size, latency, temporary-copy storage, and egress separately. If the retrieval rate or latency is not published, we cannot claim a complete restore cost, and we never treat it as zero. [2] [19] [24]
A read-only restore can charge retrieval, restore and read requests, temporary-copy storage, and egress. It never triggers early deletion; that charge requires a separate delete, overwrite, move, or transition before the class minimum. [3] [5]
Show the tableas checked 26 July to 12 October 2026
| Provider | Cold classes and restores | Egress rule | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | No separate cold class in the offer we checked [8] | Free up to 3 times average monthly storage, then $0.01/GB [25] | [8] [25] |
| Cloudflare R2 | Infrequent Access charges $0.01/GB retrieval and different Class A and B rates [12] | Internet egress is not charged | [12] |
| Wasabi | No separate cold class in the offer we checked; retrieval is not charged [8] | Egress is not charged; regularly downloading more than you store is outside Wasabi's fair-use guideline [26] | [8] [26] |
| DigitalOcean Spaces Cold Storage | every restore charge published: retrieval beyond the monthly allowance, public-internet egress beyond the shared allowance, and free requests; objects are read directly, with no restore step [8] [14] | A restore larger than your average stored amount pays retrieval on the excess, and downloads beyond 1,024 GiB a month are billed | [8] [14] [27] [28] |
| Read-only restore | Retrieval, requests, and temporary-copy storage can apply [3] | Destination-aware egress can apply; early deletion does not apply | [3] |
Sources
Every figure above comes from one of these pages, on the date shown. Each numbered reference in the text links to its entry here. Vendors change prices; if a date looks old, check the source. Three vendors publish a downloadable price feed and the rest are re-checked by hand, which is why the dates are not uniform.
Source pages checked 28 sources
- 1 Amazon S3 docs: Understanding and managing S3 storage classes docs.aws.amazon.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 2 AWS: Amazon S3 pricing aws.amazon.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 3 Amazon S3 docs: Restoring an archived object docs.aws.amazon.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 4 Azure docs: Access tiers for blob data learn.microsoft.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 5 Azure docs: Blob rehydration from the archive tier learn.microsoft.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 6 Google Cloud Storage docs: Storage classes docs.cloud.google.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 7 Google Cloud Storage pricing cloud.google.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 8 Our price table (all vendors) backupstorageprices.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 9 AWS: Amazon S3 pricing aws.amazon.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 10 Azure retail price list prices.azure.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 11 Google Cloud Storage pricing cloud.google.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 12 Cloudflare R2 docs: Pricing developers.cloudflare.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 13 DigitalOcean: Spaces Object Storage pricing www.digitalocean.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 14 DigitalOcean docs: Spaces pricing docs.digitalocean.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 15 Scaleway: Storage pricing www.scaleway.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 16 OVHcloud docs: Choosing the right Object Storage class docs.ovhcloud.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 17 OVHcloud: Public Cloud prices www.ovhcloud.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 18 Vultr docs: How is Object Storage billed? docs.vultr.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 19 Vultr docs: Object Storage subscription limits docs.vultr.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 20 Storj docs: Object Storage simplified pricing storj.dev · checked 20 October 2026
- 21 Oracle docs: Object Storage storage tiers docs.oracle.com · checked 26 July 2026
- 22 Oracle Cloud PaaS and IaaS global price list (PDF) www.oracle.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 23 Tigris pricing www.tigrisdata.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 24 OVHcloud: Cold Archive www.ovhcloud.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 25 Backblaze: B2 API pricing (Class A, B, C, D) www.backblaze.com · checked 25 July 2026
- 26 Wasabi: Pay as you go pricing FAQs wasabi.com · checked 12 October 2026
- 27 DigitalOcean: Amazon s3 vs digitalocean spaces www.digitalocean.com · checked 12 October 2026
- 28 DigitalOcean Spaces www.digitalocean.com · checked 12 October 2026