Cloud Storage Pricing: S3 vs Blob vs GCS (2026)

Ask which cloud has the cheapest object storage and you will get a confident answer that is almost always wrong. People anchor on the per-gigabyte rate, where the three big providers sit within a fraction of a cent of each other, and ignore the four other meters that actually decide the bill: requests, retrieval, replication, and above all egress. Storing data is cheap everywhere. Reading it, and especially moving it out, is where S3, Azure Blob, and Google Cloud Storage pull apart, a dynamic we trace across providers in our AWS vs Azure vs GCP comparison.

This guide compares cloud storage pricing across the three in 2026, the storage classes, the request and retrieval fees, and the egress rates that routinely push real-world spend two to five times above the headline number, so you can pick on total cost rather than the sticker. It is the same lesson that runs through cloud pricing models explained: the headline rate is rarely the real one.

The Five Things You Actually Pay For

Every provider charges across at least five dimensions, and anchoring on only the first is the classic mistake:

• Storage capacity: the per-GB-per-month rate, usually tiered down by volume.
• API operations: every PUT, GET, LIST, COPY, and DELETE carries a per-1,000 (or per-10,000) request fee.
• Retrieval: cold and archive tiers charge to read data back, sometimes heavily.
• Egress: moving data out to the internet, another region, or another cloud, often the single largest line item.
• Redundancy and minimums: geo-redundant storage roughly doubles rates, and cold tiers impose minimum-duration charges.

Storage Tier Pricing Compared

The headline hot-storage rates are close, and each provider offers cooler tiers that trade retrieval cost and minimum durations for a lower per-GB price.

Requests, Retrieval, and Egress: Where the Bill Is Decided

This is the part the per-GB rate hides. On requests, S3 charges about $0.005 per 1,000 PUTs and $0.0004 per 1,000 GETs; GCP charges about $0.05 per 10,000 Class A and $0.004 per 10,000 Class B operations; Azure is broadly comparable. A microservices app doing millions of small reads a day accumulates real request cost a per-GB estimate misses entirely.

Egress is the big one. Standard internet egress is about $0.087/GB on Azure, $0.09/GB on AWS, and $0.12/GB on GCP, and for read-heavy or multi-cloud workloads it frequently exceeds the storage charge itself. Copying 10 TB out can cost roughly $900 in egress alone, which is why moving data between clouds is so expensive, and why multi-cloud strategies are built to minimize cross-cloud movement. Cold and archive tiers add retrieval fees on top when you read data back, so a cheap archive tier can become expensive the moment you actually need the data. For how these transfer costs shape the bigger picture, see our AWS vs Azure pricing comparison and our guide to cloud total cost of ownership.

Which Provider Is Cheapest?

It depends on the workload, not the logo. Azure Blob Hot edges out on the headline hot rate; Google Cloud Standard sits in the middle; S3 has the broadest set of tiers and the deepest archive. But the deciding factors are how often you read the data, how much you move out, where it lives, and how long it stays. A write-heavy data lake that rarely reads out favors the cheapest archive tier and minimum durations. A read-heavy, egress-heavy app favors whoever charges least to move data, and often favors staying inside the cloud you already compute in, since same-region traffic to your own services is usually free. The honest answer is that the cheapest provider is the one whose pricing matches your access pattern.

The Real Answer

Cloud storage pricing punishes the buyer who reads one number. The per-gigabyte rate, the one everyone compares, is the part that barely moves between S3, Blob, and GCS and the part that matters least. What decides your bill is behavior: how many requests you make, how often you pull cold data back, and how much you send out of the provider's network. Model those against your real access pattern before you migrate anything, match the storage class to how the data is actually used, and apply the lifecycle and egress discipline in our cloud cost optimization strategies guide. Do that and storage stays the cheap foundation it should be. Skip it, and the cheapest per-GB tier can hand you the most expensive bill.₹