Dora NodaUnlimited free egress sounds like the end of the storage pricing conversation — until you read the price tag.
In May 2025, Backblaze shipped B2 Overdrive: S3-compatible object storage at $15/TB/month with unlimited free egress to any destination in the world and up to 1 Tbps of sustained throughput. Compared to standard Backblaze B2 ($6.95/TB/month, free egress capped at 3× what you store then $0.01/GB) and Cloudflare R2 ($15/TB/month, zero egress, but separate per-operation fees), Overdrive looks like the egress war's final answer. No Bandwidth Alliance hoop to jump through, no "front it with Cloudflare or pay" asterisk.
The catch is scope. Overdrive is priced and provisioned for throughput-intensive workloads — AI training, HPC, media pipelines — with a minimum storage commitment and terabit-class networking underneath. For a SaaS shipping build artifacts and static assets on a Hetzner-backed fleet, "unlimited free egress at $15/TB" lands very differently than "no egress meter on the NVMe you already pay for." This post recomputes the same workload across every option so you can see where each one actually wins.
What Overdrive is — and what "unlimited" actually means
Backblaze's storage lineup in 2026 is three tiers, not two:
| Tier | Storage | Egress to internet | Throughput | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| B2 Cloud Storage (standard) | $6.95/TB/month | Free up to 3× stored data per month, then $0.01/GB | Up to ~50 Gbps | General backup, archives, moderate-serve |
| B2 Overdrive | $15/TB/month | Unlimited free to any destination — no Alliance partner required | Up to 1 Tbps sustained | AI/ML training, HPC, high-throughput pipelines |
| B2 Reserve (committed) | Contract pricing | Same as standard (3× free) | Standard | Predictable-commit buyers |
The standard tier's 3× free egress already covers many web workloads. Store 1 TB, serve up to 3 TB/month free, pay $0.01/GB beyond that. Overdrive removes the multiplier entirely — serve 10× or 100× your stored data, still $0 egress. That's a materially different offer than the pre-Overdrive "free to partner CDNs only" deal (Cloudflare, Fastly, bunny.net) that still required you to route through a partner to avoid the meter.
Two details matter before the cost table:
- Overdrive has a minimum storage commitment. Backblaze positions it for "large quantities of frequently accessed data" — you don't spin it up for a 50 GB bucket of build artifacts. The exact minimum is negotiated, but it's not a pay-as-you-go bucket you create from the dashboard for a side project.
- Standard B2 got pricier. Effective May 1, Backblaze raised standard storage from $6/TB to $6.95/TB. Overdrive and Reserve pricing held — so the gap between standard and Overdrive narrowed from 2.5× to ~2.16× per TB, but Overdrive is still more than double standard on storage alone.
For context, the rest of the market at the same moment: Cloudflare R2 charges $15/TB/month ($0.015/GB) with zero egress to any destination and no multiplier math — but bills Class A operations at $4.50/million and Class B at $0.36/million. Wasabi charges ~$6.99/TB/month rising to $7.99 on July 1, 2026, with free egress (but with minimum-storage-duration and egress caps in the fine print). AWS S3 is $23/TB/month ($0.023/GB) plus $0.09/GB egress after the first 100 GB free.
The worked comparison: same workload, five bills
Assumptions that keep the table honest:
- Three scales: 1 TB, 10 TB, and 100 TB stored.
- Three egress appetites per scale: 1× (serve what you store once), 3× (the standard B2 free boundary), and 10× (heavy-serve — think build artifacts pulled on every deploy across many tenants).
- Pricing as of August 2026, VAT-exclusive, US/EU list. Hetzner Object Storage at €6.49/month base (post-April 2026 hike: was €4.99 for 1 TB storage + 1 TB egress, now €6.49). MinIO/Garage on Hetzner: a CX22-class box with extra NVMe modeled at €5.20 per 100 GB (see §3 for the full disk math).
At 1 TB stored
| Provider / setup | Storage/mo | Egress at 1× (1 TB) | Egress at 3× (3 TB) | Egress at 10× (10 TB) | Total at 10× |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B2 Standard | $6.95 | $0 (within 3×) | $0 (at boundary) | $70 (7 TB × $0.01/GB) | $76.95 |
| B2 Overdrive | $15.00 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $15.00 |
| Cloudflare R2 | $15.00 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $15.00 |
| Hetzner Object Storage | ~€6.49 ($7.05) | $0 (1 TB included) | ~€2.00 ($2.17) for 2 TB overage | ~€9.00 ($9.77) for 9 TB overage | ~$16.82 |
| MinIO/Garage on Hetzner NVMe | ~$5.65 (100 GB–1 TB disk slice, see below) | $0* | $0* | $0* | ~$5.65 |
* Zero egress charge — traffic rides the Hetzner box's included bandwidth (typically 20 TB/month on a CX22-class instance) or your own network. See durability/ops trade-offs in §3–4.
Read: At 1 TB with heavy egress (10×), Overdrive and R2 are already 5× cheaper than standard B2's overage. Self-hosted still undercuts all of them on sticker price — but you're comparing a managed durable object store to a single NVMe volume.
At 10 TB stored
| Provider / setup | Storage/mo | Egress at 1× (10 TB) | Egress at 3× (30 TB) | Egress at 10× (100 TB) | Total at 10× |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| B2 Standard | $69.50 | $0 | $0 | $700 (70 TB × $0.01) | $769.50 |
| B2 Overdrive | $150.00 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $150.00 |
| Cloudflare R2 | $150.00 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $150.00 + ops fees |
| Hetzner Object Storage | ~€64.90 ($70.50) for 10 TB | $0–overage | Overage scales linearly | Overage scales linearly | ~$70.50 + egress overage |
| MinIO/Garage cluster (3× replication) | ~$55–90 (disk + replication overhead) | $0* | $0* | $0* | ~$55–90 |
At 100 TB stored
| Provider / setup | Storage/mo | Egress at 10× (1,000 TB / 1 PB) | Total at 10× |
|---|---|---|---|
| B2 Standard | $695 | $9,000 (900 TB overage × $0.01/GB ≈ $9,000) | ~$9,695 |
| B2 Overdrive | $1,500 | $0 | $1,500 |
| Cloudflare R2 | $1,500 | $0 (+ Class A/B operation fees at this scale: low hundreds) | ~$1,600–1,800 |
| Hetzner Object Storage | ~$649 ($705) | Still metered beyond included TB | $705 + overage |
| MinIO/Garage fleet | ~$400–800 (fleet of NVMe nodes, 3× replication) | $0* (bandwidth-included) | ~$400–800 |
Three takeaways that survive the table:
-
Below the 3× line, Overdrive is strictly more expensive than standard B2. If your monthly egress is ≤ 3× stored, you're paying 2.16× more per TB of storage for unlimited you don't use. Standard B2's $6.95/TB wins outright.
-
Above the 3× line, Overdrive and R2 converge — and both crush standard B2. At 10× egress the gap is ~6.5× at 100 TB ($9,695 vs $1,500). This is the workload Overdrive was built for: AI training sets re-read dozens of times, large artifact registries fanning out to many workers.
-
Self-hosted is cheapest on storage + bandwidth — but cheapest is not most durable. Garage at ~50 MB RAM and MinIO at ~500 MB RAM serve bits for single-digit dollars per TB of disk, with zero egress meter because the NIC is yours. The price doesn't include the thing managed providers bundle in: replication, repair, and someone else's 11-nines durability claim.
What MinIO or Garage on Hetzner actually costs — beyond the per-GB sticker
Running your own S3 on owned Hetzner disks has no egress meter because there's no egress product — packets leave the NIC that came with the box.
The honest cost stack for a single-tenant example (1 TB stored, 3× replication):
| Line item | MinIO | Garage |
|---|---|---|
| Disk | Hetzner CX22: 80 GB NVMe included + extra volume 1 TB at ~€11.90/TB/month (volumes) or dedicated-server NVMe | Same — Garage is lighter on disk overhead |
| Memory | ~500 MB+ reserved for MinIO process | ~50 MB for Garage |
| CPU | Erasure coding / replication on write | Lightweight; Rust, lower CPU per op |
| Replication | Erasure sets or 3× replication across nodes — you provision 3 TB of raw disk for 1 TB usable | Same topology choice; Garage designed for 3+ nodes from the start |
| Bandwidth | Included: 20 TB/month on CX22-class, unmetered between Hetzner region nodes | Same |
| License | AGPLv3 — free to run internally; commercial license required if you offer it as a service to tenants | AGPLv3 as well |
| Operations | You run upgrades, repair, rebalancing, monitoring, backups | Same — smaller binary, but same ops categories |
A concrete slice: On a CX22-adjacent Hetzner Cloud box, 1 TB of usable storage with 3× replication means ~3 TB raw. At roughly €5.20 per 100 GB of additional NVMe/volume, that's ~€156/month raw — but that box also runs your app, your PaaS control plane, and any other tenants you're bin-packing. A PaaS fleet amortizes the disk across many tenants, which is why the "MinIO on Hetzner" number in the table above drops to ~$5.65/TB at the tenant slice level when disks are shared.
Where the "just run MinIO" pitch gets expensive anyway:
- Durability is yours to prove. Backblaze advertises 11 nines durability with automated repair, geographic replication, and background integrity checks. A three-node Garage cluster on three Hetzner hosts in the same region (FSN1) has no cross-region story — lose the region, lose the quorum. Cross-region replication doubles the disk math.
- Repair and rebalance aren't free. A failed NVMe at 3am pages you, not Backblaze. Erasure-code rebuild saturates the same NIC your tenants' deploys use. At fleet scale, SRE time dominates the disk bill.
- Hetzner Object Storage itself just repriced. The managed S3-compatible offering moved from €4.99 to €6.49/month base on April 1, 2026 (tracked elsewhere on this blog) — still cheap, but a reminder that even the "own hardware, add a volume" path has a vendor price that moves. And it's EU-regions only (FSN1/HEL1/NBG1) — no US/Singapore object storage yet.
Garage's niche is precise: if you want lighter resource usage, dead-simple multi-node replication, and you're comfortable with AGPLv3 and a smaller operational ecosystem than MinIO, it's the better self-hosted fit for a PaaS that needs S3 per tenant without per-tenant cloud bills. MinIO's niche is broader tooling and familiarity — but its post-2022 license enforcement (AGPLv3 for service-offering) is the same trust question this blog has tracked for Plex and MinIO's own admin-UI gating.
Where each model actually wins — a decision map
No single row wins at every scale and appetite. Use the egress multiplier as the first filter, durability/control as the second:
| If your reality is... | The sharper choice is... | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Egress ≤ 3× stored, any scale | B2 Standard at $6.95/TB | Cheapest managed durability; free egress already covers you. Overdrive's 2.16× storage premium buys nothing. |
| Egress > 3×, no throughput need, 1–10 TB | B2 Standard or Hetzner Object Storage — do the overage math | At 10× on 1 TB, Standard's $70 overage still loses to Overdrive's flat $15, so Overdrive wins. But at 4× ($10 overage) Standard is still $16.95 vs Overdrive's $15 — a wash. Model your actual multiplier. |
| Egress >> 3×, throughput-intensive, large scale (10+ TB, PB-scale reads) | B2 Overdrive | Unlimited egress plus terabit throughput at a flat per-TB storage price. Standard's $0.01/GB beyond 3× scales linearly into four figures at 100 TB/10×. |
| Egress >> 3×, but strict zero-egress, no commit, S3-ish | Cloudflare R2 at $15/TB | Same storage price as Overdrive, zero egress with no minimum commitment. Extra: $4.50/m Class A and $0.36/m Class B — usually low hundreds even at scale. |
| Full control, sovereignty, or per-tenant isolation on EU hardware | Garage (or MinIO) on Hetzner NVMe in FSN1/HEL1 | No egress meter because there's no meter — just disks and NICs you own. EU-headquartered provider, data stays in EU regions. You own durability and repair. |
| Need both: managed durability + EU data residency | Hetzner Object Storage (managed, EU-only) or OVHcloud + Scality sovereign S3 (EU-dedicated) | Managed S3 without leaving EU jurisdiction — but egress beyond included TB is still metered. |
A note on sovereignty that the table hides. Backblaze is a US-headquartered provider (San Mateo, CA). Data stored and served from any region is still subject to US jurisdiction under the CLOUD Act — the same corporate-jurisdiction half this blog tracked for AWS's European Sovereign Cloud. Hetzner and OVHcloud are EU-headquartered bare-metal providers; data on their disks and their managed object storage sits outside US corporate reach. Garage/MinIO on Hetzner inherits that property wholesale — the operator (not just the data center's country code) is outside US jurisdiction. If your regulated EU tenant needs that answer to be clean, "unlimited free egress from a US vendor" doesn't close the gap that "disks you own from an EU vendor" does.
The honest overlap: Standard B2's "3× free" already makes Overdrive irrelevant for the median SaaS that stores artifacts once and serves them a few times. Overdrive earns its premium only when re-reads compound — the AI-training or fleet-wide artifact-fanout case. For the PaaS tenant whose build output is pulled once per deploy per environment, the free egress they actually need already ships with standard B2 at less than half the storage price.
The bottom line: unlimited is a throughput product, not a default
Backblaze B2 Overdrive is a real price-structure change — not marketing. Unlimited free egress to any destination, at a flat per-TB storage price, directly attacks the egress-tax pattern hyperscalers normalized ($0.09/GB on AWS S3, $0.01/GB beyond 3× on standard B2). For a throughput-intensive tenant re-reading 100 TB ten times, the bill drops from ~$9,700 on standard B2 to $1,500 on Overdrive. That's not a rounding error.
But unlimited at $15/TB with a minimum commitment is a throughput product. A team storing 1 TB and serving 2 TB already gets that 2 TB free on standard B2's 3× allowance at $6.95/TB — less than half the storage price, same $0 egress for the traffic they actually generate. And a Cluster-API fleet running Garage on Hetzner NVMe already pays no egress meter at all — not because egress is bundled, but because there's no one left to bill it. The self-hosted bill trades a managed durability SLA and someone else's repair pager for flat disks and NICs you control, EU-jurisdiction included.
The egress war now has three stable answers, not one: pay per GB beyond 3× (standard B2), pay a higher flat per TB for unlimited and terabit (Overdrive), or remove the vendor from the path entirely (Garage/MinIO on owned disks). Pick by your egress appetite and your durability budget — not by which vendor shouts "free" loudest.
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