S3 vs UploadBird: Real Cost Comparison

S3 looks cheap until you add CloudFront, egress, request charges, and the engineering time to glue it all together. This breakdown uses a realistic workload to show how costs stack up—and how a bundled platform like UploadBird compares when you factor in both dollars and dev hours.

The workload

Think typical SaaS media needs: 10 TB stored, 20 TB egress per month, 50 million GETs, 2 million PUTs, plus image optimization and a handful of videos with thumbnails. It's not petabyte scale—it's the common case.

S3 + CloudFront bill reality

• Storage: roughly $230/mo for 10 TB (standard storage).
• Requests: around $60/mo for 50M GETs + 2M PUTs.
• Egress: $1,500–$2,000/mo depending on region mix (the big one).
• CloudFront: additional transfer + invalidation charges; heavy purges can spike costs.
• Image/video tooling: Lambda, media servers, or third-party add-ons are extra.

That puts you well north of $1,800–$2,300/mo before counting engineering time spent on IAM, CORS, presigned URLs, image transforms, and monitoring.

UploadBird's bundled approach

UploadBird pricing includes storage, CDN delivery, malware/NSFW scanning, image optimization, video processing, and signed URLs. The free tier covers small apps; paid tiers start at $10 with generous included storage and transparent overages ($0.08/GB beyond included storage).

There's no separate egress line item, no invalidation tax, and no extra bill for optimization. More importantly, you recoup the engineering time you would have spent stitching together S3, CloudFront, Lambdas, scanners, and dashboards.

The bottom line

If you love tuning AWS and modeling bills across five services, DIY might still appeal. If you want predictable costs, built-in media tooling, and fewer moving parts, UploadBird consolidates the stack and the spend. Your finance team gets a simpler invoice; your engineers get weekends back.