Quick answer: use the calculator below to see what any capacity from 1 TB to 10 TB costs per month across 8 providers on annual billing. As a rule of thumb for 2026: consumer storage runs $2 to $8 per TB per month depending on provider, object storage runs $7 to $23 per TB plus usage fees, and the largest hidden line item is egress, which adds roughly $83 to $90 per TB downloaded from Amazon S3 and $0 on Cloudflare R2, Wasabi and most consumer clouds. Rates last checked July 31, 2026.
Consumer storage cost calculator
| Provider | Est. monthly | Per TB |
|---|
Estimates use each provider’s nearest plan rate on annual billing. Plans are stepped, so real plans round up to the next tier.
How to read the results
The calculator multiplies each provider’s per-TB rate by your chosen capacity and drops providers whose largest plan is smaller than your selection. That is why OneDrive disappears above 1 TB and Dropbox above 3 TB. Real plans are stepped, so if you need 4 TB you will buy a 5 TB plan; use the 5 TB estimate as your real-world number. All rates assume annual billing, which typically saves 20 to 25 percent against monthly billing on the same plan. The pricing index lists the underlying plans behind every rate.
Worked example: a 2 TB photo library
A photographer with 1.4 TB of RAW files growing by 200 GB a year needs the 2 TB tier now and will for roughly two more years. On annual billing that costs $8.33 per month on Google One or pCloud, $10.00 on Dropbox or iCloud+. Over three years those choices diverge by about $60. The wildcard is pCloud’s 2 TB lifetime at $399 one time, which crosses even Google’s annual pricing in year four. For a library you will keep for a decade, lifetime pricing turns storage from a subscription into a purchase.
Worked example: 10 TB of business archives
At 10 TB, consumer plans thin out and object storage gets competitive. IDrive’s 10 TB tier at $14.99 per month, which is $1.50 per TB, is the consumer value play. Backblaze B2 charges $6.95 per TB, so $69.50 per month, but with no plan ceiling, per-file access from any S3-compatible tool, and free egress up to three times stored volume. If the archive is written once and rarely read, and you value pay-for-exactly-what-you-store over plan steps, B2 wins on flexibility even at the higher rate. If pure price rules, IDrive takes it.
Anatomy of an S3 bill
Amazon S3 bills at least four meters: storage at about $23 per TB per month on Standard, PUT requests at $0.005 per 1,000, GET requests at $0.0004 per 1,000, and egress at roughly $90 per TB to the internet. Store 5 TB, upload 2 million objects, serve 40 million downloads totalling 3 TB out, and the bill is about $115 storage, $10 in PUTs, $16 in GETs and $270 in egress: roughly $411, of which two thirds is moving data, not storing it. The same workload on Cloudflare R2 costs about $75 in storage, modest request fees and zero egress. This is why serious cost modelling starts with your traffic pattern, not your capacity.
Estimating egress before it bites
Egress fees apply when data leaves a cloud: user downloads, cross-cloud syncs, migrations away. The hyperscalers charge $83 to $120 per TB; Cloudflare R2, Wasabi within fair use, and Backblaze B2 up to 3x stored volume charge nothing. Two numbers to model: your steady monthly downloads, and the one-time cost of leaving with everything. A 20 TB archive on S3 carries a hidden exit invoice near $1,800; the same archive on B2 or R2 leaves for free. Full provider terms live in the object storage hub.
Cloud vs NAS: the break-even
A 2-bay NAS with two 8 TB drives costs roughly $600 to $700 up front and gives about 8 TB usable in a mirrored setup. The same 8 TB in the cloud runs $16 to $56 per month depending on provider, so the hardware pays for itself in one to three years, and drives last well beyond that. The honest answer is that this is not either-or: local storage is fast and cheap per TB, cloud is offsite and survives fires and burglaries. The standard pattern is a NAS for working data plus a cloud tier for backup, which is exactly the 3-2-1 setup we recommend.
Calculator FAQ
Why do providers disappear at higher capacities?
Each provider has a largest plan. The calculator hides any provider whose ceiling is below your selected capacity rather than pretending a plan exists.
Are these prices current?
Rates were checked against official pricing pages on July 31, 2026 and the stamp updates whenever we re-verify. Promotional first-year discounts are excluded so the numbers reflect what you pay at renewal.
Will there be more calculators?
Yes: a full S3 cost calculator with request and egress meters, a standalone egress estimator, and a cloud vs NAS break-even tool are planned for this section.
Worked example: a student with 200 GB
Below roughly 100 GB, the correct price is usually zero. A student with 60 GB of coursework and photos fits inside MEGA’s 20 GB plus Google’s 15 GB only with juggling, so the honest free answer is TeraBox for the archive and Google for active documents. The first paid rung matters more than people expect: Google One’s 100 GB tier at $19.99 a year and iCloud’s 50 GB at $0.99 a month exist precisely for this bracket, costing less than two coffees a month to end the juggling entirely. The mistake at this scale is buying 2 TB: paying for ten times the space you will use for years. Storage needs grow slower than fear suggests; buy the tier you will fill within eighteen months.
Modeling growth: price next year’s data today
Storage bills are decided by growth rate more than current size. Measure what you added in the last twelve months, add it to today’s total, and price that capacity, because that is what you will actually pay for within the plan’s first renewal. A photographer at 1.4 TB adding 200 GB a year should price 2 TB and expect it to hold for three years. A business at 8 TB doubling annually should not price 10 TB; it should price 20 TB, at which point object storage’s absence of plan ceilings becomes the real argument. Stepped consumer plans punish fast growers with repeated tier jumps; pay-per-GB object storage absorbs growth linearly. The crossover typically lands between 5 and 15 TB depending on growth speed.
The five numbers to know before you commit
Before signing up anywhere, write down: your total data today, your growth over the last year, your monthly download volume, the provider’s price at your capacity plus one tier up, and the cost of leaving with everything. The first two size your plan, the third catches egress exposure on object storage, the fourth prices your inevitable growth, and the fifth is the number providers least want you to compute. Ten minutes with these five figures prevents the two classic errors: overbuying capacity out of caution, and underestimating exit costs out of optimism. Every calculator we build exists to make one of those five numbers easier to produce.
Common modeling mistakes
Four errors account for most bad storage decisions. Pricing today’s data instead of next year’s, which guarantees a tier jump at first renewal. Ignoring egress until the first big restore or migration, the mistake the S3 example above quantifies. Comparing monthly sticker prices across providers when one is a monthly rate and the other an annualized one, a 20 to 25 percent distortion that flatters whoever you checked second. And treating promotional first-year pricing as the price, when renewal rates are what you will pay for years; our calculator excludes intro discounts for exactly this reason. The common thread is time: storage is a multi-year purchase priced in monthly fragments, and every honest model stretches the fragments back into years before comparing. Do that, and the right provider usually becomes obvious without our help.