TL;DR: For general-purpose object storage, Cloudflare R2 gives 10 GB a month with completely free egress, and Tigris matches that promise at a smaller 5 GB. Backblaze B2 also gives 10 GB, with egress free up to 3x whatever you have stored, then $0.01/GB beyond that. That’s the real difference between these tiers: capacity is nearly identical everywhere, egress terms are not, and egress is what actually costs money at scale. For image and video delivery, ImageKit.io leads on raw bandwidth at 20 GB a month, and Gumlet goes further at 100 GB, paired with 60 minutes of video storage. Full comparison and exclusions below.
What’s in this list, and what isn’t
This covers two related jobs: storing and serving arbitrary files through an S3-compatible bucket API, and transforming or delivering images and video through a dedicated media pipeline. A few names that come up in the same breath don’t make the tables:
- Amazon S3 doesn’t have a dedicated free storage quota anymore. New AWS accounts get up to $200 in credit, usable across every eligible AWS service including S3, for six months after account creation - not a sustained free tier, the same call the email roundup made on Amazon SES.
- Storj gives 25 GB of storage free for 30 days, with no credit card required - a trial, not a recurring allowance. After 30 days, paid plans start at $7/TB.
- Container Registry includes 1 GB of storage on its free tier, but it’s a Harbor-based image registry for container builds, not a general-purpose bucket for application files.
- Synology C2 OneStorage and Imgix are both 30-day trials, not permanent free plans - Imgix’s trial includes 100 credits and needs no card, but neither keeps working once the trial ends.
- Amazon Elastic Block Store gives 30 GB of block storage on the AWS intro tier, but EBS attaches to a single EC2 instance as a disk volume - it isn’t an object store you reach over HTTP, so it answers a different question than the rest of this list.
- Consumer sync and backup - Sync (5 GB), Internxt (1 GB), Degoo (20 GB), Ente Photos (10 GB), BorgBase (10 GB for backup hosting), and Seafile (a free 3-user Pro license, self-hosted) all give real permanent free storage, but they’re built for personal file sync, photo backup, or self-hosted team drives, not for an application to read and write against through an API.
Object storage and S3-compatible buckets
Six products here give you a bucket you write to from code, with an S3-compatible or REST API, at broadly similar capacity and very different egress bills once you outgrow the free tier.
| Product | Free storage | Free egress | Other limits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare R2 | 10 GB-month | Unlimited, free | 1M Class A + 10M Class B operations/month |
| Backblaze B2 | 10 GB | Free up to 3x stored, then $0.01/GB | No minimum file size fees |
| Tigris | 5 GB | Unlimited, free | 10K write ops, 100K read ops/month |
| Appwrite | 2 GB | 5 GB bandwidth/month | 750K executions, 75K monthly active users |
| Supabase | 1 GB | 5 GB bandwidth/month | 50 MB max upload size |
| Pinata | 1 GB | 10 GB bandwidth/month | 500 files, 10K requests/month, 1 gateway |
Cloudflare R2 and Tigris are the two that actually deliver on “free egress” without a catch: R2 states plainly that data transfer to the internet is free at any volume, and Tigris makes the same promise for egress, regional transfer, and region-to-region transfer alike. Tigris trades that for a smaller storage allowance, 5 GB against R2’s 10 GB, and a lower operation ceiling.
Backblaze B2 matches R2’s 10 GB of storage but caps free egress at three times whatever you have stored that month - download more than that and it’s $0.01/GB. For an application that reads back roughly as much as it writes, that ceiling rarely bites; for one that serves the same files over and over to a lot of readers, it will.
Appwrite and Supabase both bundle storage into a wider backend-as-a-service free plan rather than selling it standalone. Appwrite gives more headroom - 2 GB storage against Supabase’s 1 GB, and 5 GB of bandwidth against Supabase’s 5 GB egress cap paired with a 50 MB per-file limit - but free Appwrite projects pause after a week without traffic, so a side project you don’t touch for a while needs a visit to wake back up. Pinata is built specifically around IPFS and file pinning rather than general buckets: 1 GB of storage, 500 files, 10 GB of bandwidth, and a single gateway, with 10,000 requests a month across the API.
Image and media delivery
These nine handle a different job: resizing, transforming, transcoding, or serving images and video through a CDN, rather than storing arbitrary files.
| Product | Free tier | Gotcha |
|---|---|---|
| Gumlet | 100 GB bandwidth, 60 storage minutes | 60 minutes of live streaming, 1 seat |
| ImageKit.io | 20 GB bandwidth, 3 GB storage | 500 video units, 650 AI-feature units/month |
| Cloudinary | 25 credits/month | 1 credit = 1,000 transformations, 1 GB storage, or 1 GB bandwidth |
| Transloadit | 5 GB/month | Watermarks images; trims audio and video output |
| TwicPics | 3 GB CDN bandwidth | 1 workspace, 1 domain, 1 user |
| Uploadcare | 1 GB storage, 5 GB traffic | 1,000 operations/month, personal use only |
| Sirv | 0.5 GB storage, 2 GB transfer | Sirv branding on 360 spins and zooms |
| ImgBB | Unlimited images | 32 MB max file size per upload |
| wsrv.nl | Free, no signup | Resizes on the fly; doesn’t store your images |
Gumlet and ImageKit.io are the two built for real production traffic. Gumlet’s 100 GB of monthly bandwidth is the largest number in this table by a wide margin, paired with 60 storage minutes for video and 60 minutes of live streaming a month, all on a single seat. ImageKit.io gives less bandwidth at 20 GB but adds 3 GB of dedicated asset storage, 500 video processing units, and 650 units for its AI-powered features like background removal, spread across 2 user seats.
Cloudinary measures everything in credits rather than a flat GB number, which makes it hard to compare directly: 25 credits a month, where one credit buys 1,000 transformations, 1 GB of storage, or 1 GB of image bandwidth (2 GB of video bandwidth is a paid-plan-only rate). In practice that’s roughly worth 25 GB of storage or bandwidth if you spend every credit on one thing, but most accounts split usage across all three and burn through the allowance faster than the raw number suggests. Transloadit gives 5 GB of monthly processing with 200 priority slots and 2 collaborators, but every free-tier image gets a visible watermark, while video and audio output is trimmed instead - fine for testing an integration, not for anything you’d ship.
TwicPics and Uploadcare sit at the smaller end. TwicPics gives 3 GB of CDN bandwidth but restricts the free plan to a single workspace, domain, and user - no room to run more than one project on it. Uploadcare pairs 1 GB of storage with 5 GB of monthly traffic and 1,000 processing operations, but its pricing page restricts the free plan to personal use, not production traffic for a business. Sirv is smaller still at 0.5 GB storage and 2 GB of transfer, though it allows 3 users to manage the account and its 360-degree spin and zoom features - which carry Sirv’s own branding on the free plan - are unusual to find at any price point this low.
ImgBB and wsrv.nl don’t fit the same shape as the rest. ImgBB doesn’t cap total storage or bandwidth at all - the only stated limit is 32 MB per individual image upload, making it closer to an image host than a delivery pipeline. wsrv.nl isn’t storage in any sense: it’s a free resizing proxy that pulls an image from a URL you already control, transforms it on the fly, and serves the result, with no account or signup required - useful paired with real storage, not a replacement for it.
Which one should you actually use?
- Best free egress for a general-purpose bucket: Cloudflare R2 - 10 GB storage with unlimited free egress, no asterisk.
- Smaller footprint, same free-egress promise: Tigris - 5 GB storage, zero egress fees on every kind of transfer.
- Already spending moderate egress and comfortable with a soft cap: Backblaze B2 - 10 GB storage, free egress up to 3x what you store.
- Storage bundled with a backend you’re already using: Supabase or Appwrite, if you’re building on either platform anyway.
- Highest free bandwidth for image or video delivery: Gumlet at 100 GB a month, with video storage and live streaming minutes included.
- A resizing proxy for images you already host elsewhere: wsrv.nl - free, no signup, no storage of its own.
Whichever you pick, check its page in the object storage or image and media CDNs category for the exact numbers before you build against it - egress terms, operation caps, and branding requirements change what a flat storage figure actually gets you.
FAQ
What’s the best free tier for S3-compatible object storage? Cloudflare R2 gives 10 GB of storage with completely free egress at any volume. Tigris makes the same free-egress promise at a smaller 5 GB if R2’s operation limits don’t fit your use case.
Does Amazon S3 have a free tier? Not a dedicated one anymore. New AWS accounts get up to $200 in Free Tier credit, usable across S3 and other eligible services, for six months after account creation - after that, or once the credit runs out, S3 billing is pay-as-you-go.
Which free object storage has the best egress terms? Cloudflare R2 and Tigris both state that egress is free at unlimited volume. Backblaze B2 caps free egress at three times your average monthly storage before charging $0.01/GB beyond that.
Is there a free tier for image or video CDN delivery? Yes - Gumlet, ImageKit.io, Cloudinary, and Transloadit all run permanent free plans for image and video processing and delivery, at bandwidth ranging from 5 GB to 100 GB a month.
Do any of these require a credit card to start? Storj’s 30-day trial and Imgix’s 30-day trial both state no card is required. Most of the permanent free tiers in the tables above don’t address it either way on their pricing pages, so check at signup.
See also
- Free Email Sending Tiers in 2026 - transactional email and newsletter free tiers, the same comparison shape applied to sending
- Object storage and image and media CDNs - every free-tier product in each category, filterable
- Free-tier products - every permanent free plan on the site, not just this list
- FTV methodology - how the dollar value on each product page is estimated