Is S3 Glacier always cheaper than S3 Standard?

No. Glacier classes have lower storage prices but charge more per request, add per-GB retrieval fees, and bill a minimum storage duration (90 or 180 days). Small objects also carry about 40 KB of billed overhead each. For data that is read often, deleted quickly, or stored as many small objects, S3 Standard or Standard-IA can cost less overall.

What is the minimum storage duration in S3 and Google Cloud Storage?

S3 Standard-IA and One Zone-IA bill a 30-day minimum, Glacier Instant Retrieval and Glacier Flexible Retrieval 90 days, and Glacier Deep Archive 180 days. In Google Cloud Storage, Nearline has a 30-day minimum, Coldline 90 days, and Archive 365 days. Deleting, overwriting, or moving an object earlier is billed as if it had been stored for the full minimum.

Why do small objects cost more in infrequent-access storage classes?

S3 Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, and Glacier Instant Retrieval bill each object as at least 128 KB. Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Archive add 40 KB of metadata per object, 8 KB of it at the S3 Standard rate. Millions of small objects can make a cold class more expensive than Standard.

S3 vs Google Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Lowest monthly cost $0 -

S3 Standard, same workload $0 -

Your workload

Monthly figures. Edit any field and the table updates.

Data stored

Number of objects

Average object size: -

Writes per month

PUT, COPY, POST, LIST (S3) or Class A (GCS)

Reads per month

GET and HEAD (S3) or Class B (GCS)

Data read per month

Drives retrieval fees in cold classes

Share of reads to the internet

Billed as egress. Reads in the same region are free.

Typical object lifetime (days) Shorter than a class's minimum adds early-deletion charges

Data touched in the last 90 days

Used for S3 Intelligent-Tiering only

Show Only classes with millisecond reads Amazon S3 Google Cloud Storage

Monthly cost by storage class

Sorted cheapest first. USD, list price.

Storage class	Storage	Requests	Retrieval	Early deletion	Egress	Monthly	Yearly	Relative cost

Prices used

Class	Storage / GB-mo	Writes / 1K	Reads / 1K	Retrieval / GB	Min. days	Min. object

List prices for Amazon S3 in US East (N. Virginia) and Google Cloud Storage in Iowa (us-central1, single region), checked October 2026 against the AWS Price List API and Google's Cloud Storage pricing page. 1 TB is treated as 1024 GB, as both providers bill in binary units. Internet egress uses each provider's volume tiers (AWS: $0.09 to $0.05 per GB; Google: $0.12 to $0.08 per GB to worldwide destinations outside Asia and Australia). Free tiers, committed-use discounts, taxes, replication, and multi-region pricing are not included. For Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Archive, reads are counted as standard-speed restore requests.

How S3 and Google Cloud Storage pricing really works

Both providers advertise storage classes by their per-GB-month price, and the gap looks enormous: S3 Standard is $0.023 per GB-month while Glacier Deep Archive is $0.00099, more than twenty times cheaper. But the storage line is only one of five charges, and the colder the class, the more the other four matter.

Requests. Writing to Glacier Flexible Retrieval costs $0.03 per 1,000 PUTs, six times the S3 Standard rate. GCS Archive charges $0.05 per 1,000 for both writes and reads.
Retrieval fees. Infrequent-access and archive classes charge for every GB you read back, from $0.01 per GB (S3 Standard-IA, GCS Nearline) to $0.05 per GB (GCS Archive).
Minimum storage duration. Delete an object from GCS Archive after a month and you still pay for 365 days. This calculator spreads that charge across your typical object lifetime.
Minimum billable object size. S3 Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, and Glacier Instant Retrieval bill every object as at least 128 KB. Glacier Flexible Retrieval and Deep Archive add 40 KB of overhead per object.
Egress. Data read to the internet is billed by the network, not the storage class, so it is the same across classes from one provider. It is often the largest line, and it is one place where AWS and Google differ.

When S3 Intelligent-Tiering is worth it

Intelligent-Tiering moves objects between access tiers automatically and charges no retrieval fee, for a monitoring fee of $0.0025 per 1,000 objects per month. With large objects and unpredictable access it is usually the safest default. With millions of small objects the monitoring fee adds up, and objects under 128 KB are never moved out of the frequent tier. Google's equivalent is Autoclass, which this calculator does not model separately.

When a colder class costs more

Try the default workload with a lifetime of 30 days, or set the object count to 500 million. The archive classes drop down the table quickly. Cold storage pays off for large objects that are written once, kept for months or years, and rarely read.

Egress is often a bigger line than storage. Use the cloud egress cost estimator to model it across AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, or the AWS NAT Gateway cost estimator to see what S3 traffic through a NAT gateway is costing you.

S3 vs Google Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Your workload

Monthly cost by storage class

How S3 and Google Cloud Storage pricing really works

When S3 Intelligent-Tiering is worth it

When a colder class costs more

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