Cloud Backup Cost Calculator
Cloud backup has two costs people forget: what you pay to keep the data, and what you pay to get it back. Enter how much you'd store and how much you'd restore, and compare the real monthly and yearly cost across the major object-storage providers.
Tip: for restore cost, estimate a full recovery once or twice a year — e.g. a 500 GB restore averaged out is ~40 GB/month. That's where egress fees bite.
| Provider | Storage | Restore | / month | / year |
|---|
Estimates only. List prices for US regions as of June 2026, standard / hot storage tier. “Restore” uses each provider's per-GB internet egress rate; free-egress providers show $0. This ignores API request charges, minimum-retention windows, and free tiers, so treat it as a ballpark. Always confirm current pricing on each provider's official page before deciding.
Why restore cost matters
A backup you can't afford to restore isn't a backup. Hot object stores like S3 and Google Cloud charge for egress, so pulling a few hundred gigabytes back during a real recovery can cost more than a month of storage. Cold tiers (Glacier Deep Archive, Azure Archive) are cheap to store but add retrieval fees and delays on top of egress. The cheapest sticker price is often not the cheapest recovery.
Provider notes
- Wasabi & Cloudflare R2 advertise no egress fees, so restores show as $0 — but Wasabi has a minimum storage duration and a minimum monthly charge.
- Backblaze B2 is among the cheapest for storage with low egress and a free allowance, which makes it a strong default for backup.
- Amazon S3, Google Cloud and Azure carry higher egress; the real bill depends heavily on how much you restore and request counts.
The calculator is the argument for owning your storage
This is exactly why BackupKit is bring-your-own-storage. You pick the destination with the economics that suit you — cheap object storage, a NAS you already own, or a server you run — and BackupKit handles the encrypted, scheduled backups on top. You're never paying a backup vendor's marked-up storage or locked into one cloud. A NAS has zero egress; an SFTP server is flat-rate. Native S3-compatible object storage is coming soon.