21 Object Storage Providers, and the One Thing None of Them Do
Summary
We put 21 object storage providers side by side: five hyperscalers, eleven cheaper alternatives, three edge networks, one decentralized, one you run yourself. Storage price is the boring dimension, with the whole field between $6 and $25.50 per TB per month, roughly a 4x spread. Egress has no ratio at all: Google Cloud charges $120 per TB to hand your own data back, while Cloudflare R2 charges nothing, so walking out with 10 TB costs $1,200 or $0 depending only on where the bytes sit. Migration is also less painful than it looks, because 19 of the 21 expose a full or native S3 API, which makes moving mostly an endpoint change. Then there is the thing no bucket does: a list call returns keys, sizes and timestamps and says nothing about what is inside the file, so it cannot tell you which of 40,000 clips has someone holding a red umbrella. Mixpeek connects the bucket you already have, reads the contents across video, images, PDFs and audio, and makes them searchable in place. Prices re-verified against each vendor's own pricing page in July 2026. Full comparison: storage.mixpeek.com
About this video
We put 21 object storage providers side by side: five hyperscalers, eleven cheaper alternatives, three edge networks, one decentralized, one you run yourself. Storage price is the boring dimension, with the whole field between $6 and $25.50 per TB per month, roughly a 4x spread. Egress has no ratio at all: Google Cloud charges $120 per TB to hand your own data back, while Cloudflare R2 charges nothing, so walking out with 10 TB costs $1,200 or $0 depending only on where the bytes sit. Migration is also less painful than it looks, because 19 of the 21 expose a full or native S3 API, which makes moving mostly an endpoint change. Then there is the thing no bucket does: a list call returns keys, sizes and timestamps and says nothing about what is inside the file, so it cannot tell you which of 40,000 clips has someone holding a red umbrella. Mixpeek connects the bucket you already have, reads the contents across video, images, PDFs and audio, and makes them searchable in place. Prices re-verified against each vendor's own pricing page in July 2026. Full comparison: storage.mixpeek.com