Updated October 25, 2026
· ~2 min read
R2's pitch is one line: S3-compatible storage with no egress fees. It is accurate, and for some workloads it saves most of the bill. For others it saves nothing, because the egress was never going to be paid at S3's internet rate.
The question is where your bytes go. To browsers through a CDN, to another cloud, or nowhere at all.
Traffic that cannot go through a CDN. Dataset downloads by other companies, model weights pulled into another cloud's GPUs, multi-cloud replication, customer exports, a public API that returns large files. None of it is cacheable at an edge and all of it is billed by S3 at internet rates. Here R2 is not 20% cheaper; it removes the line item. R2 also suits teams already on Cloudflare: a Worker can read and write a bucket with no credentials to manage, and public buckets work on a custom domain.
R2 implements the core S3 API, so most SDKs and tools work with an endpoint change. It is not S3's whole surface. There are no deep-archive storage classes, no S3 event notifications into Lambda, SQS or EventBridge, no Athena or Redshift Spectrum reading it in place, no S3 Tables or S3 Vectors, and no IAM policies. Access is through Cloudflare API tokens. The hidden cost is everything inside AWS that reads the data. A Lambda or Glue job in us-east-1 reading from R2 pulls bytes over the internet: free to leave R2, but slower than in-region S3 and outside your VPC endpoints and IAM model.
Question 1 of 2
Who downloads the data?
**Serving files to the internet through a CDN:** S3 behind CloudFront on a flat-rate plan is now close to R2 on cost, and you keep S3's features and IAM. **Serving data directly to other clouds, partners or customers' systems:** R2. That traffic does not go through a CDN, and $0.09/GB adds up fast. **Data that mostly sits still, or is read inside AWS:** S3. Egress is not your cost; storage classes, lifecycle rules and in-region access are.
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As of October 25, 2026. Provided as is, for general information, and accurate to the best of our knowledge on the date shown. Not legal, compliance, tax, financial or other professional advice. Prices, limits and vendor services change; check current vendor documentation before relying on anything here. Terms of use.