---
title: AWS S3
slug: aws-s3
url: "https://toolweight.com/options/aws-s3"
homepage: "https://aws.amazon.com/s3/"
categories: s3-compatible-storage
last_verified: 2026-07-23
license: CC-BY-4.0
---

# AWS S3

> The API everything else copies, and by far the most expensive egress in this roster.

S3 defines the interface, the semantics and the edge cases every other provider on this page implements against, and it remains the most complete: storage classes, Object Lock, replication, Access Points, event notifications, and IAM condition keys nobody else matches. It is also the reason this comparison exists, at USD 0.09 per gigabyte, egress on a read-heavy workload costs more than everything else combined.

## Identity

|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| Name | AWS S3 |
| Company | Amazon Web Services |
| One-liner | The API everything else copies, and by far the most expensive egress in this roster. |
| Site | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/ |
| Docs | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/s3/ |
| Founded | 2006 |
| Brand | https://toolweight.com/vendors/AWS |
| Compared in | 1 |

## Where it is compared

### [S3-compatible storage](https://toolweight.com/compare/s3-compatible-storage)
Ranked **#10 of 12** on default weights.
| Field | Value | Confidence | Verified | Source | Note |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| True cost /mo (USD) | $472.6 /mo | Inferred | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | us-east-1, S3 Standard. Storage 1,000 GB x $0.023 = $23.00. Egress (5,000 - 100 free) GB x $0.09 = $441.00. PUT/LIST 1 M at $0.005/1,000 = $5.00. GET 9 M at $0.0004/1,000 = $3.60. Total $472.60, of which 93% is bandwidth. Egress stays inside AWS's first 10 TB band at 5 TB, so no tiering applies. In ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) the same workload is $592.20, see the Sydney column for that arithmetic. |
| True cost /mo (AUD) | A$718.35 /mo | Inferred | 2026-07-23 | - | $472.60 x 1.52, a conversion of the us-east-1 bill. Run from Sydney it is a quarter higher again; the Sydney column has it. |
| True cost from Sydney (AUD) | A$900.14 /mo | Inferred | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | ap-southeast-2, S3 Standard. Storage 1,000 GB x $0.025 = $25.00. Egress (5,000 - 100 free) GB x $0.114 = $558.60. PUT/LIST 1 M at $0.005/1,000 = $5.00. GET 9 M at $0.0004/1,000 = $3.60. Total $592.20 x 1.52 = A$900.14. Sydney egress is 27% dearer per gigabyte than us-east-1, which on this workload is most of the difference. |
| Storage $/TB/mo | $23 /TB/mo | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | $0.023/GB-month for S3 Standard, first 50 TB, us-east-1. Sydney is $0.025. |
| Egress $/TB | $90 /TB | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | $0.09/GB to the internet for the first 10 TB per month, with only the first 100 GB free across the whole account. Sydney is $0.114/GB. Origin fetch from S3 to CloudFront is free, which is the only real mitigation inside AWS. |
| Egress cap (x stored) | - | Unknown | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | Not applicable: egress is metered per gigabyte beyond a flat 100 GB a month, not granted as a multiple of stored volume. |
| Class A $/M ops | $5 /M ops | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | $0.005 per 1,000 PUT/COPY/POST/LIST. |
| Class B $/M ops | $0.4 /M ops | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | $0.0004 per 1,000 GET/SELECT. |
| Min retention | 0 ms | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | None on S3 Standard. Standard-IA and One Zone-IA carry 30 days, the Glacier classes 90 or 180. |
| Min billed object | 0 B | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/ | None on S3 Standard. The infrequent-access classes apply a 128 KB floor, which is how small objects end up costing more in the cheaper tier. |
| S3 API coverage | 100 % | Inferred | 2026-07-23 | - | By definition, this is the specification everything else is measured against. |
| Presigned URLs | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Multipart upload | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Versioning | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Lifecycle rules | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Event notifications | ● | Inferred | - | - | - |
| CDN integration | first-party-paid | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/pricing/ | CloudFront, billed separately at around $0.085/GB, but origin fetch from S3 is free so it replaces S3 egress rather than stacking on it. |
| Max object size | 45.5 TB | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/faqs/ | 50 TB. AWS raised its own ceiling well above the 5 TiB limit every S3 clone in this roster inherited from it, so the specification and the implementations have diverged here. The largest single PUT is still 5 GB; anything above 100 MB wants multipart. |
| IAM granularity | 5 | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/security-iam.html | Policy documents with condition keys, resource policies, assumable roles, STS, Access Points and Access Grants. Nothing else in this roster is close. |
| Sydney region | ● | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/regions_az/ | ap-southeast-2, with three availability zones, and a Melbourne region alongside it. |
| TTFB from Sydney | 25 ms | Inferred | - | - | In-metro from ap-southeast-2. |
| Durability (nines) | 11  nines | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/ | - |
| Uptime SLA | 99.9 % | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/sla/ | Credit-backed monthly availability for S3 Standard. |
| Object lock / WORM | ● | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/object-lock.html | Governance and compliance modes plus legal holds, the implementation everyone else's is compared against. |
| Replication model | multi-az | Vendor-claimed | 2026-07-23 | https://aws.amazon.com/s3/storage-classes/ | S3 Standard spans at least three availability zones within a region by default. Cross-region replication is a separate, separately billed feature. |
| Official MCP server | ● | Inferred | - | - | AWS maintains a set of official MCP servers covering its APIs, including S3 operations. |
| GA year | 2,006 | Inferred | - | - | - |
| Positioning | The reference implementation, priced for customers who are not leaving. | Inferred | - | - | - |

**Verdict.** Still the most capable object store by a wide margin, and thirty-eight times the cost of Hetzner on this scenario almost entirely because of bandwidth. Stay on S3 if you genuinely use Object Lock compliance mode, Access Points, cross-region replication or IAM condition keys; otherwise you are paying $441 a month for an API you can get elsewhere.

## Alternatives

- [Backblaze B2](https://toolweight.com/options/backblaze-b2), Cheap US and EU object storage with free egress up to three times stored volume.
- [Bunny Storage](https://toolweight.com/options/bunny-storage), Edge storage built as a CDN origin, with its own API rather than a faithful S3 one.
- [Cloudflare R2](https://toolweight.com/options/cloudflare-r2), S3-compatible object storage with zero egress fees, on Cloudflare's network.
- [DigitalOcean Spaces](https://toolweight.com/options/digitalocean-spaces), Bundled object storage plus free CDN, priced as a flat base fee with overages.
- [Hetzner Object Storage](https://toolweight.com/options/hetzner-object-storage), The cheapest credible S3 endpoint in Europe, with a deliberately thin feature set.
- [iDrive e2](https://toolweight.com/options/idrive-e2), USD 4/TB S3-compatible storage with zero-egress marketing and a fair-use cap.
- [MinIO](https://toolweight.com/options/minio), The self-hosted S3 reference implementation, your hardware, your bandwidth, your SLA.
- [Scaleway Object Storage](https://toolweight.com/options/scaleway-object-storage), European-sovereign S3 storage with multi-AZ classes and a real IAM system.
- [Storj](https://toolweight.com/options/storj), Decentralised erasure-coded storage: USD 4/TB stored, USD 7/TB egress, no regions.
- [Tigris](https://toolweight.com/options/tigris), Globally distributed S3-compatible storage that caches objects near readers.
- [Wasabi](https://toolweight.com/options/wasabi), Flat-rate hot storage with no egress or API fees, bounded by a fair-use cap.

## Licence and attribution

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