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Comment by wackget | Hacker News Reader

The article's not entirely accurate. It says the storage bandwidth fees are "totally elimiated" but that's not true:

> R2 will zero-rate infrequent storage operations under a threshold — currently planned to be in the single digit requests per second range. Above this range, R2 will charge significantly less per-operation than the major providers.

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R2's final pricing isn't yet announced, but my understanding of the quoted section is that R2 will charge for storage operations (API calls), what S3 calls "Requests & data retrievals" on their pricing page [0]. But _egress_ (bandwidth) fees, which can be the most costly component of an S3 bill, are totally eliminated.

S3 — Charges for amount of data resident on disk, amount of data retrieved, and each API call

R2 — Charges for amount of data resident on disk and some API calls (over a threshold). No charge for data retrieved.

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

I can't wait to read the small print when it comes to actual egress bandwidth pricing. I can't believe it's going to actually cost zero dollars for all use-cases.

How can they possibly nullify the bandwith costs?

extensive peering arrangements

Poor man's R2 is already here. Up and running in form of Workers KV ($5 per million writes, $0.5 per million reads, $5 per 10GB), which can store blobs upto 25MB. Front it with Workers Bundled ($0.5 per million calls proxied) and it quickly gets real close to what one'd pay for R2.

And no, unlike Amazon with Lightsail, Cloudflare is okay with anyone bypassing bandwidth charges when using the Workers Bundled [1].

[0] https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/platform/pricing#k...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20791605

That was the top comment on this HN thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28702997

The reply was: "Per operation charges, even if at the same level as EC2, would still be substantially cheaper."

Indeed, the specific terms will be really interesting to watch. Even if the per-operation fees are high by comparison after that threshold, it could still result in a huge savings for big file downloads.

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