S3 Storage Class Calculator
Compare S3 Standard, Infrequent Access, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant and Glacier Flexible on your object count, size and access rate — with transition requests, retrieval fees, minimum durations and the 128 KB floor all charged.
All classes, fully costed
| Class | Storage | Retrieval | Transition | Effective/mo | vs Standard |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | $1,150.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $1,150.20 | — |
| S3 Intelligent-Tiering (frequent tier) | $1,150.00 | $0.00 | $200.00 | $1,208.53 | -$58.33 |
| S3 Standard-Infrequent Access30-day minimum | $625.00 | $15.00 | $200.00 | $648.83 | $501.37 |
| S3 One Zone-Infrequent Access30-day minimum | $500.00 | $15.00 | $200.00 | $523.83 | $626.37 |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval90-day minimum | $200.00 | $45.00 | $400.00 | $266.67 | $883.53 |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval90-day minimum · async retrieval | $180.00 | $0.00 | $600.00 | $205.20 | $945.00 |
“Effective/mo” includes storage, retrieval, GET requests, Intelligent-Tiering monitoring, and the transition cost spread across your 24-month retention.
What this model assumes
- Transition requests are charged. Moving 20M objects to Glacier Flexible costs $600.00 once. For buckets with many small objects this frequently exceeds a year of storage saving — which is why every comparison here shows the one-off separately.
- The 128 KB minimum billable size is applied. Standard-IA, One Zone-IA and Glacier Instant Retrieval bill small objects as 128 KB.
- Minimum storage durations are shown but not amortised into a penalty. The model assumes data lives at least as long as the class minimum. If your lifecycle deletes objects before 30 or 90 days, the real cost is higher than shown.
- S3 Glacier Deep Archive is deliberately absent. Its lifecycle transition rate ($0.05 per 1,000) is published in the us-east-1 price list, but the direct storage rate is not — the only Deep Archive figure in that file is the Intelligent-Tiering Deep Archive tier. Rather than publish a rate nobody read off a vendor page, the class is omitted.
- Retrieval time is not a cost, but it is a constraint. Glacier Flexible Retrieval needs minutes to hours before an object can be read. If anything in your system expects a synchronous GET, that class is not a candidate at any price.
- S3 storage classes, requests and lifecycle transitions — source, read 4 Aug 2026
US East (N. Virginia) list prices, excluding any negotiated or committed-use discount. Your effective rate is lower if you have one.
Frequently asked questions
When is S3 Standard-IA actually cheaper than Standard?
Standard-IA storage costs $0.0125 per GB-month against Standard at $0.023 — a 46% discount on storage alone. It becomes a real saving when three things hold: objects are at least 128 KB (smaller ones are billed as 128 KB), the data lives at least 30 days, and you read little of it (retrieval costs $0.01 per GB on top of storage). Fail any of the three and IA can cost more than Standard.
How much does an S3 lifecycle transition cost?
It depends on the destination: $0.01 per 1,000 objects to Standard-IA, One Zone-IA or Intelligent-Tiering, $0.02 to Glacier Instant Retrieval, $0.03 to Glacier Flexible Retrieval and $0.05 to Deep Archive. For a bucket with tens of millions of small objects this one-off can exceed a year of storage saving, which is why this calculator shows it separately and computes a payback period.
Is S3 Intelligent-Tiering worth it?
It costs $0.0025 per 1,000 objects per month to monitor, and moves objects between tiers for free with no retrieval charges. For buckets with unpredictable access patterns and objects above 128 KB it is usually the right default. For buckets with millions of tiny objects the monitoring fee dominates — and objects under 128 KB are not auto-tiered at all, so you pay to monitor data that never moves.
What is the S3 minimum billable object size?
128 KB for Standard-IA, One Zone-IA and Glacier Instant Retrieval. An object smaller than that is billed as if it were 128 KB. A bucket of 20 KB thumbnails therefore gets billed at more than six times its real size in those classes, which turns a 46% discount into a large increase. S3 Standard and Glacier Flexible Retrieval have no such floor.
What is the minimum storage duration for S3 Glacier?
90 days for Glacier Instant Retrieval and Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and 180 days for Deep Archive. Standard-IA and One Zone-IA require 30 days. Delete or re-tier an object before the minimum and you still pay for the remaining days, so a lifecycle policy that moves data to Glacier and deletes it at 60 days pays a penalty on every object.
The hard part is knowing what is in the bucket.
Finitizer reads S3 Storage Lens and inventory data to get real object-size distributions and access patterns per prefix — then recommends the lifecycle policy that fits each one, rather than a single rule applied to a whole bucket.