S3 Glacier Pricing: Storage Classes Compared
"Glacier" isn't one price — AWS sells three cold-storage tiers under that name, each trading a lower per-GB rate for a slower, more expensive retrieval. Rates below are typical us-east-1 (N. Virginia) pricing per GB per month; always confirm current numbers on the AWS S3 pricing page for your region.
| Storage Class | Price / GB / mo | Retrieval Time | Min. Storage Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| S3 Standard | ~$0.023 | Milliseconds | None |
| S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | ~$0.004 | Milliseconds | 90 days |
| S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval | ~$0.0036 | 1 min – 12 hrs | 90 days |
| S3 Glacier Deep Archive | ~$0.00099 | 12 – 48 hrs | 180 days |
Glacier vs. Glacier Deep Archive: What's the Difference?
S3 Glacier Flexible Retrieval (formerly just "S3 Glacier") is for archives you might need back within hours — backups, compliance copies, media you occasionally re-access. S3 Glacier Deep Archive is roughly 3.6x cheaper per GB but takes 12–48 hours to restore, and is built for data you almost never touch: 7-year regulatory retention, long-tail media archives, disaster-recovery tape replacement. If your restore SLA tolerates a day of waiting, Deep Archive is nearly always the cheaper choice.
S3 Glacier and Deep Archive Retrieval Costs
Pulling data back out of cold storage isn't free — each tier has its own retrieval speed/price trade-off, billed per GB retrieved:
| Tier | Speed | ~Price / GB |
|---|---|---|
| Flexible Retrieval — Expedited | 1–5 minutes | $0.03 |
| Flexible Retrieval — Standard | 3–5 hours | $0.01 |
| Flexible Retrieval — Bulk | 5–12 hours | $0.0025 |
| Deep Archive — Standard | Within 12 hours | $0.02 |
| Deep Archive — Bulk | Within 48 hours | $0.0025 |
What the Calculator Above Models
The tool above focuses on the two costs that most often surprise teams migrating to cold storage: the ongoing storage-price gap between S3 Standard and Glacier Deep Archive, and the one-time PUT/transition request fee ($0.05 per 1,000 objects) that a lifecycle rule charges when moving each object. That transition fee scales with object count, not size — archiving millions of small files can rack up a transition bill steep enough that you never break even against S3 Standard within your retention window. It does not model per-GB retrieval fees (the tables above), since those only apply if and when you restore the data back out.
How much does it cost to move data from S3 to Glacier?
Moving data via an S3 Lifecycle rule costs $0.05 per 1,000 PUT/transition requests — one request per object, regardless of its size. For a bucket of 10 million small files, that's a $500 one-time fee before you save a cent on storage. Consolidating small files (e.g. into larger archives or Parquet files) before transitioning dramatically cuts this cost — enter your file count and average size above to see your exact transition fee and breakeven month.