Object storage providers charge for reading your own data back in one of six ways. Here is each mechanism, what each one costs on the same 10 TB workload, and exactly what XNS’s $0 does and does not cover.
The mechanism
Storage is billed per byte held. Egress is billed per byte that leaves the provider’s network to the internet. They are separate lines, and the second one is the reason a storage bill that looked fixed turns out not to be.
The awkward part is when egress lands. Storage cost is predictable — you know roughly how much you hold. Egress cost is driven by events you do not schedule: a restore after a failure, a migration off the platform, an audit that wants three years of records pulled at once, a rebuild of a downstream index. The bill arrives at the moment you are already having a bad week.
That is also why egress terms are worth reading closely before you need them. Every provider below is telling the truth on its own pricing page. The differences are in the mechanism, and the mechanism is what determines whether an unusual month costs you nothing or costs you more than a year of storage.
Six models
“No egress fees” is not one promise. It is at least four different ones, and two of them have a ceiling.
| Model | Example | What you pay to read data out | Where the ceiling is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Metered per GB | Amazon S3 | $0.090/GB for the first 10 TB per month, tiering down to $0.050/GB above 150 TB, after a 100 GB monthly free allowance | No ceiling — the bill scales with the size of your worst day |
| Free to a ratio, then priced | Backblaze B2 | $0 up to 3× your average monthly stored volume, then $0.01/GB | 3× stored volume per month. Beyond it you get a price, not a phone call |
| Free to a ratio, enforced by policy | Wasabi | $0, with a published guideline that monthly egress stays at or below your stored volume | 1× stored volume. There is no overage price; Wasabi reserves the right to “limit or suspend your service” for exceeding it on a regular basis |
| Free, operations metered | Cloudflare R2 | $0 egress, uncapped — but Class A operations at $4.50/million and Class B at $0.36/million | No egress ceiling. The cost moved to storage ($0.015/GB-month) and to per-request billing |
| Priced openly per TB | Storj | $7.00 per TB out, on top of $7.00 per TB stored | No ceiling, but no surprise either — it is a posted rate, not a tier table |
| Free, uncapped | XNS | $0 — no per-GB rate, no ratio, no overage price, no separate retrieval fee | No ceiling. A 30-day minimum retention applies to stored objects, with no early-delete fee on top of it |
Worked example
The ratio caps do not bite in a normal month. They bite in the month you actually need your data — a full restore, a rebuild, a migration. So here is the same 10 TB read back once, and then four times.
| Provider | Storage, 10 TB | Egress: read 10 TB out once | Egress: read 10 TB out four times (40 TB) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 Standard | $235.52 | $912.60 | $3,524.30 |
| Wasabi | $79.90 | $0.00 | No charge exists — 4× stored volume is outside the published guideline, and the stated remedy is service limitation or suspension |
| Backblaze B2 | $69.50 | $0.00 | $102.40 — 30 TB free, 10 TB at $0.01/GB |
| Cloudflare R2 Standard | $150.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 — plus per-request operation charges |
| Storj Standard | $70.00 | $70.00 | $280.00 |
| XNS | $60.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
Scope
No per-GB egress rate. No ratio between what you store and what you may read. No overage price to reach, because there is no allowance to exhaust. No separate retrieval fee of the kind AWS’s colder classes charge on top of egress. No restore fee. The rate is $6.00 per TB per month, $0 egress, uncapped, 30-day minimum retention, no early-delete fee — per TB of your data, with the erasure-coded protection that makes it durable included in that figure rather than billed on top.
It is a current price, not a perpetual guarantee. pricing.json carries an effective date and a valid-through date. The terms on this page hold between them. If you are reading a copy after that window, or a figure someone quoted from this page, re-fetch xns.tech/pricing.json before you rely on it.
Egress pricing may be introduced later. We are still learning what egress actually costs us at scale, and we would rather say so than promise something we have not measured. Data uploaded before any such change stays on $0-egress terms — early customers are not repriced on data they have already put in.
Your own host’s bandwidth is yours. XNS is not a bucket you rent from a shared endpoint. You run the Relayer gateway on your own Docker host, at a domain you control. The $0 applies to what XNS bills you. Whatever your ISP, colo or cloud provider charges for traffic leaving that machine is between you and them, and it is a real line to check before you model your costs.
A 30-day minimum retention applies. Objects deleted sooner are billed to 30 days. There is no separate early-delete fee stacked on top, and no 90-day minimum of the kind some competitors apply — but it is a minimum, and it is the one thing on this page that can cost you money you did not expect.
Due diligence
Ask these of us too. Every answer above is on this page, and every one of them is checkable against the vendor’s own documentation in about ten minutes.
Provenance
| Figure | Source | Read on |
|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 storage and data-transfer-out tiers | aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing — per-GB figures confirmed against the AWS Price List Bulk API, which the pricing page renders from | 2026-08-19 |
| Wasabi price and egress guideline | wasabi.com/pricing and wasabi.com/pricing/faq | 2026-08-19 |
| Storj storage and egress | storj.dev/dcs/pricing/simplified and storj.io/pricing | 2026-08-19 |
| Backblaze B2 price and 3× allowance | backblaze.com/cloud-storage/pricing | 2026-09-04 |
| Cloudflare R2 storage, egress and operations | developers.cloudflare.com/r2/pricing | 2026-09-04 |
| XNS price, egress and retention terms | xns.tech/pricing.json — canonical, versioned, carries its own effective and valid-through dates | current |
$6.00 per TB per month. $0 egress, uncapped. 30-day minimum retention, no early-delete fee. The machine-readable version carries its own version and effective dates, so you never have to trust a figure you found on a page.
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