There is no universal money-saving winner. Backblaze B2 is usually easier to price because it publishes a per-capacity rate and an included egress allowance. Self-hosted S3 can cost less when you already own suitable servers, have the skills to operate them, and can keep a large, steady data set busy for years. It can cost more than B2 when you must buy redundant hardware, pay for power and connectivity, maintain a second copy, and value the time spent running the system.
The honest comparison is B2’s recurring bill versus the total cost of ownership for a resilient self-hosted deployment. A single server with disks is not an equivalent alternative to a hosted object store with independent durability and recovery options.
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Backblaze B2
B2 is a hosted object-storage service with an S3-compatible API. You pay for the amount of data stored, transfer that exceeds the included allowance, and any billable API operations. Backblaze publishes these prices, so the storage portion of a budget can be estimated without buying equipment or forecasting its service life.
Self-hosted S3
Self-hosted S3 means operating software that presents an S3-compatible interface on hardware you control. MinIO is one example of that software; its documentation is useful for understanding storage layouts, parity and hardware, but its recommendations are not a universal requirement for every implementation. You remain responsible for drives, servers, networking, electricity, cooling, software updates, monitoring, repairs and recovery.
#1 Best Overall
- Entry-level NAS Personal Storage：UGREEN NAS DH2300 is your first and best NAS made easy. It is designed for beginners who want a simple, private way to store videos, photos and personal files, which is intuitive for users moving from cloud storage or external drives and move away from scattered date across devices. This entry-level NAS 2-bay perfect for personal entertainment, photo storage, and easy data backup (doesn't support Docker or virtual machines).
- Set Your Devices Free, Expand Your Digital World: This unified storage hub supports massive capacity up to 64TB.*Storage drives not included. Stop Deleting, Start Storing. You can store 22 million 3MB images, or 2 million 30MB songs, or 43K 1.5GB movies or 67 million 1MB documents! UGREEN NAS is a better way to free up storage across all your devices such as phones, computers, tablets and also does automatic backups across devices regardless of the operating system—Window, iOS, Android or macOS.
- The Smarter Long-term Way to Store: Unlike cloud storage with recurring monthly fees, a UGREEN NAS enclosure requires only a one-time purchase for long-term use. For example, you only need to pay $459.98 for a NAS, while for cloud storage, you need to pay $719.88 per year, $2,159.64 for 3 years, $3,599.40 for 5 years. You will save $6,738.82 over 10 years with UGREEN NAS! *NAS cost based on DH2300 + 12TB HDD; cloud cost based on 12TB plan (e.g. $59.99/month).
- Blazing Speed, Minimal Power: Equipped with a high-performance processor, 1GbE port, and 4GB RAM on Board, this NAS handles multiple tasks with ease. File transfers reach up to 125MB/s—a 1GB file takes only 8 seconds. Don't let slow clouds hold you back; they often need over 100 seconds for the same task. The difference is clear.
- Let AI Better Organize Your Memories: UGREEN NAS uses AI to tag faces, locations, texts, and objects—so you can effortlessly find any photo by searching for who or what's in it in seconds. It also automatically finds and deletes similar or duplicate photo, backs up live photos and allows you to share them with your friends or family with just one tap. Everything stays effortlessly organized, powered by intelligent tagging and recognition.
Backblaze B2’s published charges in October 2026
The current B2 pricing page lists $6.95 per terabyte per 30 days for pay-as-you-go storage. The first 10 GB in an account is free. This rate took effect on May 1, 2026, when the price rose from $6 to $6.95 per TB per month and API transaction fees were eliminated.
| Cost item | Current published treatment | Important qualification |
|---|---|---|
| Stored data | $6.95 per TB per 30 days | Pay-as-you-go rate; first 10 GB of an account is free. |
| Included egress | Up to three times average monthly stored data | The allowance is based on average monthly storage, not a one-time peak. |
| Egress above allowance | $0.01 per GB | Applies outside qualifying partner routes; check the destination and current terms. |
| Qualifying partner egress | Can be unlimited and free | Backblaze lists CDN and compute partners, including Cloudflare, Fastly and bunny.net. Eligibility depends on the route and current conditions. |
| File-size and duration fees | None listed | The pricing page says there are no minimum file-size or storage-duration fees. |
| Class A API calls | Free | Current published transaction pricing. |
| Class B API calls | Free | Current published transaction pricing. |
| Class C API calls | Free | Current published transaction pricing. |
| Class D API calls | $0.004 per 10,000 | Charged only after 2,500 free Class D calls per day. |
These figures are the published rates available in October 2026. Verify the live price page before committing to a long-term budget because vendor pricing and partner terms can change.
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How to estimate a B2 monthly bill
Use your average stored volume, not the largest bucket size reached during the month. A practical worksheet is:
- Record the average terabytes stored during the billing period.
- Subtract the account’s free 10 GB when calculating billable storage.
- Multiply the remaining terabytes by $6.95.
- Multiply average stored terabytes by three to find the included egress volume.
- Measure egress outside qualifying partner routes. Multiply the excess gigabytes by $0.01.
- Check Class D operations. The first 2,500 Class D calls each day are free; only the remainder is charged at $0.004 per 10,000 calls. Classes A, B and C are currently free.
For example, if an account averages 2 TB, its included egress ceiling is 6 TB for that month. Downloading less than that does not create an egress charge under the published allowance. Downloading more requires you to calculate only the excess, unless the traffic uses a qualifying partner route. The storage charge still applies even when egress is free.
Do not treat “three times” as unlimited transfer. A workload that repeatedly restores many times its stored volume can exceed the allowance, and partner-free egress is conditional rather than automatic.
Rank #2
- 【Advanced Home Data & Media Hub】For advanced home users who need phone backup, file storage, and centralized data management. Centralize family photos, 4K videos, movies, computer backups, and personal files in one place while running multiple apps for home entertainment and everyday data management. Suitable for households with growing digital libraries and multiple NAS use cases.
- 【Built for Creators, Media Servers & Advanced Apps】Powered by the Intel N100 Quad-Core CPU, 8GB DDR5 RAM, 2.5GbE networking, and dual M.2 NVMe slots, DXP2800 handles large files and heavier workloads with ease. Run Docker, virtual machines, and media server applications compatible with Plex—ideal for content creators, tech enthusiasts, and advanced home users managing 4K videos, RAW photos, personal media libraries, and multiple NAS apps.
- 【Up to 80TB for Growing Digital Libraries】 Supports up to 80TB of storage using two HDD bays and two M.2 NVMe SSD slots for family photos, movies, RAW photos, 4K videos, work files, and device backups. AI photo management supports recognition of people, objects, scenes, and locations, album organization, and duplicate photo detection. HDDs and SSDs are not included.
- 【AI-powered Home Surveillance】Turn DXP2800 into a centralized home surveillance hub by connecting compatible network cameras and storing recordings locally on your NAS. AI-powered features include Face Recognition, People Detection, and Pet Detection, helping advanced home users review important events more efficiently while managing home surveillance and personal data in one place.
- 【One data Center Across Your Devices】Keep files from desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, and other devices together instead of scattered across cloud accounts and external drives. Access, back up, organize, and share data across Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, web browsers, and compatible smart TVs—ideal for creators and advanced home users working across multiple devices.
What self-hosting really costs
A fair self-hosted budget spreads every cost over the period in which the equipment is useful. The following categories belong in the calculation.
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Drives and servers
Count the purchase price of data drives, boot devices, chassis, CPUs, memory, host-bus adapters, power supplies, cooling and any enclosure. If equipment is shared with other workloads, allocate the proportion used by object storage. Amortize the cost over a realistic replacement horizon rather than assigning it to the first month.
Parity, spares and expansion headroom
Usable capacity is lower than the sum of drive labels when erasure coding or another redundancy scheme is used. MinIO explains that higher parity improves tolerance of drive or node failures while reducing usable capacity; lower parity provides more usable space with less failure tolerance. Add hot spares and room for growth, because a cluster filled to its raw maximum has little room to rebuild or expand.
The exact overhead depends on the number of drives or nodes and the selected parity settings. There is no honest universal conversion such as “buy exactly twice the raw capacity.” Calculate the layout you intend to deploy and compare its usable capacity with your retention target.
Electricity and cooling
Measure or estimate the continuous draw of the complete system, not just the disks. Include the host, switches, UPS losses and cooling. Multiply the measured kilowatt draw by hours in the billing period and your local electricity rate. In a warm room, the heat produced by the system can add a material cooling cost.
Rank #3
- Your Personal Streaming Server - Build your own Netflix-style media library and stream 4K movies, shows and photos to any device without monthly fees
- Create Your Own Cloud - Store your entire photo, video and music collection; access from anywhere with fast 282 MB/s transfer speeds
- Creator-Grade Backup Solution - Protect your irreplaceable content with automated backups to cloud services, external drives and remote NAS
- Multi-Layered Data Protection - Combine RAID redundancy, automated backups and snapshot technology to prevent data loss from any cause
- Smart Home Surveillance - Support up to 30 IP cameras with AI detection, instant alerts and secure remote monitoring
Replacement parts and downtime
Budget for failed drives, fans, power supplies, controllers and eventually the server itself. A replacement drive is not the whole incident cost: rebuilding consumes time and performance, and a second failure during a vulnerable window may require additional capacity. Include the value of service interruptions if the storage supports production work.
Network service and transfer
Self-hosting requires an upload path fast enough for initial ingestion, replication and restores. Include recurring internet service, static addressing or equivalent access, firewall equipment and any provider transfer fees. A residential connection may have data caps, asymmetric upload speed or terms that make hosting unsuitable.
An independent copy
One local cluster is one failure domain. Fire, theft, flood, ransomware, a bad administrator change or a site-wide power event can remove every copy in the room. Add off-site replication or a separate backup, plus the storage and network costs needed to keep it current. This is the cost category most likely to disappear from a simplistic “I already own the drives” comparison.
Operating time
Someone must patch the operating system and storage software, rotate credentials, watch alerts, replace failed components, test restores and document procedures. Price that time at the rate you would pay for equivalent technical work, even if you perform it yourself. If no one can respond when a node fails, the nominal hardware saving may buy a less reliable service.
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Capacity and resilience: compare usable storage, not raw terabytes
Start with the data you must retain, then add versions, temporary working space and expected growth. Map that requirement to a redundancy layout. For each candidate layout, record:
Rank #4
- Entry-level NAS Home Storage: The UGREEN NAS DH4300 Plus is an entry-level 4-bay NAS that's ideal for home media and vast private storage you can access from anywhere and also supports Docker but not virtual machines. You can record, store, share happy moment with your families and friends, which is intuitive for users moving from cloud storage, or external drives to create your own private cloud, access files from any device.
- Smart Photo Backup & AI Album: Automatically back up photos and videos from your phone in real time and keep growing family memories organized with AI-powered photo albums. Semantic search, custom learning, and recognition of people, objects, pets, and similar photos help you quickly find the moments you want. Duplicate photo removal also helps keep your library organized—ideal for families and users with large photo collections.
- User-Friendly App & Easy Setup: Connect quickly via NFC, set up simply and share files fast on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, web browsers, and smart TVs. You can access data remotely from any of your mixed devices. What's more, UGREEN NAS enclosure comes with beginner-friendly user manual and video instructions to ensure you can easily take full advantage of its features.
- More Cost-effective Storage Solution: Unlike cloud storage with recurring monthly fees, A UGREEN NAS enclosure requires only a one-time purchase for long-term use. For example, you only need to pay $629.99 for a NAS, while for cloud storage, you need to pay $719.88 per year, $1,439.76 for 2 years, $2,159.64 for 3 years, $7,198.80 for 10 years. You will save $6,568.81 over 10 years with UGREEN NAS! *NAS cost based on DH4300 Plus + 12TB HDD; cloud cost based on 12TB plan (e.g. $59.99/month).
- Your Data, You Control：No third-party clouds, no hidden access, UGREEN NAS provides a more secure and private data storage solution. It stores data locally on your private hard drives and does automatic backups. Thus, you can keep full control over it. The advanced encryption is TRUSTe certified in the United States and is awarded the first (and only) ETSI EN 303 645 certification mark for NAS products by TÜV SÜD Group.
- Raw drive capacity.
- Usable capacity after erasure coding or mirroring.
- Number of simultaneous drive or node failures tolerated.
- Hot-spare capacity and rebuild behavior.
- Expansion capacity before another hardware purchase.
- Whether a separate site or cloud copy exists.
MinIO recommends direct-attached local storage for performance and consistency over networked storage. Its guidance says flash is appropriate for hot data and that HDD deployments are best suited to cold-tier use. That distinction affects both the purchase price and the user experience: a cheap, high-capacity HDD array may be economical for archives but unsuitable for latency-sensitive object access.
For large-scale infrastructure, MinIO’s reference guidance lists x64 processors, NVMe drives, 100 GbE networking, at least 256 GB of RAM and a Linux kernel version 5.x or newer. These are vendor recommendations for large-scale deployments, not a minimum for a home lab or every S3-compatible service. Do not buy to those specifications unless your throughput, scale and failure-domain requirements justify them.
A decision worksheet for your own numbers
Put both options in the same spreadsheet and use identical retention and recovery requirements.
| Input | B2 entry | Self-hosted entry |
|---|---|---|
| Average data stored | Monthly average in TB | Same logical data set in TB |
| Growth and retention | Versions and deletion policy | Versions, deletion policy and expansion headroom |
| Usable capacity needed | Logical requirement | Logical requirement divided across the chosen parity or mirror layout |
| Monthly storage cost | Billable TB × $6.95, after the free 10 GB | Amortized hardware plus power, cooling and service |
| Monthly egress | Allowance is 3× average stored data; excess is $0.01/GB unless a qualifying route applies | Provider and transfer charges for uploads, replication and restores |
| API and software costs | Classes A, B and C free; Class D charged after the daily free tier | Software support, licenses, monitoring and administrative tooling |
| Recovery copy | Optional additional backup budget | Off-site replica or independent backup is required for equivalent resilience |
| People cost | Usually limited to account and integration work | Setup, patching, alert response, replacement and restore testing |
Calculate a monthly total for each option, then repeat it with a conservative growth rate and a high-retrieval month. The result is a range, not a universal break-even point. The available published information does not provide your hardware prices, power rate, staffing cost, workload or resilience target, so no single monthly threshold can be stated responsibly.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.Which option fits common situations?
You need predictable budgeting and minimal operations
B2 is the simpler choice when you want a published capacity price, an included egress allowance and no hardware project. It also avoids buying enough equipment for a rare peak. Confirm that your expected downloads fit the three-times allowance or a qualifying partner route, and budget for any independent backup you require.
Best Value
- Value NAS with RAID for centralized storage and backup for all your devices. Check out the LS 700 for enhanced features, cloud capabilities, macOS 26, and up to 7x faster performance than the LS 200.
- Connect the LinkStation to your router and enjoy shared network storage for your devices. The NAS is compatible with Windows and macOS*, and Buffalo's US-based support is on-hand 24/7 for installation walkthroughs. *Only for macOS 15 (Sequoia) and earlier. For macOS 26, check out our LS 700 series.
- Subscription-Free Personal Cloud – Store, back up, and manage all your videos, music, and photos and access them anytime without paying any monthly fees.
- Storage Purpose-Built for Data Security – A NAS designed to keep your data safe, the LS200 features a closed system to reduce vulnerabilities from 3rd party apps and SSL encryption for secure file transfers.
- Back Up Multiple Computers & Devices – NAS Navigator management utility and PC backup software included. NAS Navigator 2 for macOS 15 and earlier. You can set up automated backups of data on your computers.
You already have suitable, underused hardware
Self-hosting deserves a calculation when the servers, drives, rack space and network are already paid for and have meaningful remaining life. Do not assign those assets a zero cost: include electricity, replacement parts, parity loss, a second copy and operator time. If those costs are small relative to the data volume, self-hosting may win.
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New hardware can erase the apparent price advantage. Hot workloads may require flash, high-throughput networking and more memory than an archival array. Include the cost of meeting performance and failure-tolerance targets, not merely the cheapest raw disks.
You store a large, steady archive for years
A long-lived, predictable archive can spread capital costs over time, especially when retrieval is infrequent and the organization already operates storage infrastructure. The calculation still needs an off-site copy and a replacement plan. A large archive that is frequently restored may incur substantial network and operational costs even if the disks are inexpensive.
You have irregular restores or unpredictable growth
B2’s usage-based model avoids buying for the maximum future footprint. Its egress allowance may absorb ordinary retrieval, but model a disaster-recovery event separately. A restore that downloads several times the stored volume can create overage unless it uses an eligible partner path.
Is storing extra data a cost-effective way to unlock free egress?
Not automatically. Because the included allowance is three times average stored data, storing more data can raise the allowance, but the extra data also incurs the $6.95-per-TB-per-30-days storage charge. Compare the cost of the additional stored volume with the egress charge it would otherwise avoid, using your actual average storage and transfer units. If the data has no retention or business value, keeping it solely to enlarge an allowance is usually an unattractive trade; if it is legitimate retained data, the larger allowance may be a useful side effect.
Also check the route first. Egress through a qualifying CDN or compute partner can already be free under current terms, so adding storage would not create a saving in that case. Eligibility and terms can change.
Implementation checklists
Before choosing B2
- Measure average stored data, not just the current maximum.
- Estimate normal downloads and a full disaster-recovery restore.
- Check whether destinations qualify for partner egress.
- Classify API activity so Class D operations are not underestimated.
- Define version retention and deletion rules; retained versions are billable storage.
- Decide whether a second backup is needed and include it in the budget.
- Recheck the live price page before signing a long-term commitment.
Before deploying self-hosted S3
- Write down the required usable capacity and growth horizon.
- Select parity or mirroring based on failure tolerance, then calculate the resulting usable space.
- Reserve hot spares and expansion capacity.
- Match HDD or flash to cold or hot workload behavior.
- Verify direct-attached storage, network bandwidth and Linux compatibility for the chosen software.
- Provide off-site replication or a separate backup in another failure domain.
- Estimate electricity, cooling, internet service, replacement parts and operator hours.
- Test a complete restore before declaring the system reliable.
- Document patching, credential rotation, alerting and drive-replacement procedures.
Common mistakes that reverse the result
- Comparing raw disk price with B2’s finished service. Raw capacity becomes usable capacity only after parity, filesystem and spare overhead.
- Calling the 3× allowance unlimited. It is tied to average stored data, and overage is charged outside qualifying routes.
- Ignoring the second copy. A local cluster is not an off-site backup.
- Using a hot-data performance target for an archive build. Flash, memory and networking can dominate a new deployment’s cost.
- Counting only purchase cost. Power, cooling, repairs, connectivity and labor recur after the hardware invoice is paid.
- Assuming API activity is always free. Classes A, B and C are currently free, but Class D has a charge after its daily free tier.
- Projecting today’s price indefinitely. The B2 rate changed from $6 to $6.95 per TB per month on May 1, 2026; future changes are possible.
Bottom line
Choose B2 when predictable pricing, rapid deployment and reduced operational work matter more than owning the infrastructure. Choose self-hosted S3 only after a capacity-and-resilience design shows that existing or planned hardware, power, networking, backups and staff time fit your budget. The deciding figure is not the price of a drive or the headline cloud rate; it is the monthly cost of delivering the same usable capacity, recovery capability and performance.
Quick Recap
Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon at the time of purchase will apply.
