Cloudflare R2

Summary

What it is

An S3-compatible object storage service from Cloudflare with zero egress fees, integrated with the Cloudflare global edge network.

Where it fits

R2 directly addresses the Egress Cost pain point that shapes S3 architecture decisions. By eliminating egress charges, R2 changes the economics of multi-cloud, CDN, and data distribution workloads that are prohibitively expensive on AWS S3.

Misconceptions / Traps

R2 is S3-compatible but does not support all S3 features (e.g., Object Lock, some lifecycle features). Test compatibility thoroughly before migration.
Zero egress does not mean zero cost. Storage costs, Class A/B operation costs, and Workers integration costs still apply. The break-even vs S3 happens at very low egress ratios; for write-heavy / read-rare workloads R2 isn't dramatically cheaper.
Class A operations (writes, lists) at ~$4.50/1M are the operations to watch — heavy ingestion pipelines that fan out small files can hit unexpected bills. Coalesce into multipart uploads.
The native Workers integration is what makes R2 strategic for AI/edge use cases. Treating R2 as just "cheap S3" misses the compute-co-located angle: a Worker can read R2 at sub-10ms cold-cache latencies because it runs in the same network as the storage.
10 GB free tier monthly + 1M Class A + 10M Class B free per month — small deployments can run on R2 effectively free.

Pricing posture (April 2026): Storage $0.015/GB-mo Standard (under S3's $0.023). Class A ops $4.50/1M, Class B ops $0.36/1M. Egress: $0 to anywhere, including non-Cloudflare destinations. Most read-heavy workloads save 60–90% switching from S3.

Where it wins: any workload that's egress-dominated (CDN-fronted media, public dataset hosting, AI inference assets at edge), multi-cloud staging tier where R2 holds the canonical copy and you replicate cheaply to other clouds, ML model artifacts served to many edge inference endpoints.

Key Connections

implements S3 API — S3-compatible interface
solves Egress Cost — zero egress fees, the headline differentiator
solves Vendor Lock-In — S3-compatible alternative to AWS
solves High Cloud Inference Cost — edge inference assets served from same network as compute

Definition

What it is

Cloudflare's S3-compatible object storage with **zero egress fees**, globally distributed across Cloudflare's edge network. The defining differentiator vs S3 is the cost model: storage is metered and billed, but **bandwidth out (egress) is free** — eliminating the line item that drives multi-cloud architectures away from AWS S3 for any workload that's read-heavy or CDN-fronted.

Why it exists

Egress costs from AWS S3 can dominate total cloud spend (often 50–80% of bill for content-heavy workloads). R2 eliminates egress fees entirely, making multi-cloud and CDN-fronted object storage architectures economically viable. Cloudflare's strategic bet: stop charging for the network because owning the customer relationship is more valuable than the egress line item.

Primary use cases

Egress-free media storage (video, audio, images), multi-cloud data distribution where R2 is the cheap-egress staging tier, CDN-fronted object storage with native Workers integration, S3-compatible storage with predictable monthly costs (no surprise bandwidth bills), AI inference assets served at edge, dataset hosting for ML model artifacts.