Thread by @QuinnyPig

Time to put on my Cloud Economics Pants and do a bit of math around @Cloudflare's R2 pricing model as described herein.

blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-r2…

So today I'm going to store 1GB of data in @awscloud's S3 and serve it out to the internet. The storage charge is 2.3¢ per month the tier 1 regions.

Someone on the internet grabs that 1GB of data once. I'm paying 9¢ to send it to them. You read that right; just shy of four months' of storage charges to send it to the internet once.

As described, R2 sits in CloudFlare's world. The first time you request an object from S3 via CloudFlare, I pay 9¢ to send it out, then 1.5¢ a month to keep it in R2.

And from that point forward egress becomes free. But I'm not done.

Now look, @eastdakota strikes me as a stand-up guy, but he's a network guy; my data is SUPER important. I want to keep it on S3.

I can cut it over to use S3 Infrequent Access. This drops the price on AWS to 1.25¢ per GB per month. Should R2 break and need to re-retrieve it again, I'll pay another 9¢ to transfer it out, plus a 1¢ surcharge for retrieving it from Infrequent Access.

Let's tie this together. I can pay 2.3¢ per GB plus a whopping 9¢ per GB of transfer, *OR* I can pay 2.75¢ per GB to keep it in both places, secure in the knowledge that my egress traffic is a one-time 9¢ charge, the end.

Would I take that deal?

Dear reader, yesterday I would have sold you for glue in order to secure that deal. Today I don't have to.

The only response @awscloud realistically has is to significantly cut their egress pricing in one form or another, in which case customers win.

(A "surcharge to CloudFlare" or whatnot would destroy trust in their business and is untenable.)

This is frankly brilliant of @Cloudflare. I'm just waiting for an astroturf campaign ineptly trying to cast shade their way about how dangerous / risky their object storage is, but as mentioned upthread I can mitigate data loss risk by keeping it both places simultaneously.

All of this is of course the worst case cost model if you distrust @Cloudflare not to lose data. Trust it (something that comes with longevity) and the economics improve by a lot.

One final point: Now let’s remember that the internet is 1-to-many. If 1 million people download that 1GB this month, my cost with @cloudflare R2 this way rounds up to 13¢. With @awscloud S3 it’s $59,247.52.

THAT is why people are losing their minds over this.

Slight correction: $53,891.16. Apologies, the @awscloud pricing calculator LOVES to slip "developer support" onto the tab.