Meter
Cold storage is cheaper to keep and dearer to open
Cold storage is a family of classes intended for less-frequent access. The label can describe an online class with a retrieval charge, an archive class that needs a restore step, or a provider-specific allowance, so class name alone cannot price or time a recovery.
Put your own numbers through the calculator to see what this meter does to a normal month and to the day you restore.
Cold storage trades access conditions for a different storage contract
Cold storage is an object-storage class intended for data read less often than a hot or standard class. Its contract commonly changes storage price together with one or more of retrieval price, request price, minimum duration, object-size treatment, 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]
| Cold-storage question | Required answer | Wrong assumption | Source ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| 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 an explicit unresolved state [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 vendors contribute 24 captured cold or archive classes
The class audit identifies 24 genuine cold, infrequent-access, glacier, archive, or archive-access classes across 10 of the 18 vendors. The other 8 vendor rows remain visible as does not apply to the captured offer set rather than receiving an invented cold tier. [8] [1] [4] [6]
does not apply means no separate cold class appears in the 61 captured offers. It does not claim that a vendor can never launch another product. Storj remains stale because current documentation describes a different pricing generation from the captured Standard record. [8] [20]
Ten vendors contribute 24 captured cold or archive classes18 rows
| Provider | Captured cold or archive classes | Coverage state | Source ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 | Standard-IA; One Zone-IA; Glacier Instant Retrieval; Glacier Flexible Retrieval; Glacier Deep Archive; Intelligent-Tiering archive access [1] | 6 genuine class or archive-access entries | [1] [2] |
| Azure Blob Storage | Cool LRS; Cold LRS; Archive LRS [4] | 3 genuine classes | [4] [10] |
| Google Cloud Storage | Nearline; Coldline; Archive [6] | 3 genuine classes | [6] [7] |
| Cloudflare R2 | Infrequent Access [12] | 1 genuine class | [12] |
| Backblaze B2 | does not apply to the captured B2 Cloud Storage offer [8] | No separate captured cold class | [8] |
| Wasabi | does not apply to the captured Hot Cloud Storage offer [8] | No separate captured cold class | [8] |
| IDrive e2 | does not apply to the captured IDrive e2 offer [8] | No separate captured cold class | [8] |
| DigitalOcean Spaces | Spaces Cold Storage [13] | 1 class; current canonical record includes retrieval, public-internet egress, object floors, and early-deletion rules | [8] [13] [14] |
| Scaleway Object Storage | Glacier [15] | 1 genuine class | [15] |
| OVHcloud Object Storage | Infrequent Access; Active Archive; Cold Archive [16] | 3 genuine classes | [16] [17] |
| Hetzner Object Storage | does not apply to the captured Object Storage offer [8] | No separate captured cold class | [8] |
| Akamai Cloud Object Storage | does not apply to the captured Object Storage offer [8] | No separate captured 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 captured Standard record [8] | stale: current documentation uses a different pricing generation | [8] [20] |
| Oracle OCI Object Storage | Infrequent Access; Archive [21] | 2 genuine classes | [21] [22] |
| Tigris | Infrequent Access; Archive; Archive Instant Retrieval [23] | 3 genuine classes | [23] |
| Filebase | does not apply to the captured Object Storage offer [8] | No separate captured cold class | [8] |
| Telnyx Cloud Storage | does not apply to the captured Regular Storage offers [8] | No separate captured cold class | [8] |
Cold storage is cheaper only if the complete recovery contract still works
A cold-class comparison must retain storage, retrieval, requests, minimum duration, object-size treatment, latency, temporary-copy storage, and egress as separate facts. An unpublished retrieval rate or latency prevents a complete restore claim and never becomes 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]
| Provider | Cold-class or recovery relevance | Egress rule | Source ref |
|---|---|---|---|
| Backblaze B2 | No separate cold class in the captured offer [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 captured offer; retrieval is not charged [8] | Inside-policy egress is not charged; excess per-GB pricing is not published [26] | [8] [26] |
| DigitalOcean Spaces Cold Storage | retrieval and public-internet egress published; request rates, restored-copy behavior, and latency not published [8] [14] | Do not rank the known subtotal as a complete cold restore | [8] [14] |
| 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 machine-readable feed and the rest are re-checked by hand, which is why the dates are not uniform.
The source ledger26 sources
- 1AWS documentation: Storage class introdocs.aws.amazon.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 2Amazon Web Services: S3 pricingaws.amazon.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 3AWS documentation: Restoring objectsdocs.aws.amazon.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 4Microsoft Learn: Access tiers overviewlearn.microsoft.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 5Microsoft Learn: Archive rehydrate overviewlearn.microsoft.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 6Google Cloud documentation: Storage classesdocs.cloud.google.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 7Google Cloud: Storage pricingcloud.google.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 8This repository: providers.jsonrepository · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 9Amazon Web Services: S3 pricingaws.amazon.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 10Azure Retail Prices API: Retail pricesprices.azure.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 11Google Cloud: Storage pricingcloud.google.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 12Cloudflare developer docs: R2 pricingdevelopers.cloudflare.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 13DigitalOcean: Spaces object storagewww.digitalocean.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 14DigitalOcean documentation: Pricingdocs.digitalocean.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 15Scaleway: Storagewww.scaleway.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 16OVHcloud documentationdocs.ovhcloud.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 17OVHcloud: Public cloud priceswww.ovhcloud.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 18Vultr documentation: How is object storage billeddocs.vultr.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 19Vultr documentation: Limitsdocs.vultr.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 20Storj developer docs: Simplifiedstorj.dev · checked 2026-07-26
- 21Oracle documentation: Understandingstoragetiersdocs.oracle.com · checked 2026-07-26
- 22Oraclewww.oracle.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 23Tigris: Pricingwww.tigrisdata.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 24OVHcloud: Cold archivewww.ovhcloud.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 25Backblaze: Transaction pricingwww.backblaze.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z
- 26Wasabi: Faqwasabi.com · checked 2026-07-25T15:34:44Z