How AIOZ Storage Pricing Works: Storage and Delivery Costs

AIOZ Storage has exactly two line items on your bill: storage and delivery. No per-request fees, no tiered plans, no free trial to soften the first invoice. This article covers the actual numbers, how billing is metered hour by hour, what happens if your balance runs out, and how the whole structure holds up against AWS S3 and the newer alt-cloud providers built to undercut it.

TL;DR:

• AIOZ Storage costs $17/TB/month for storage and $5/TB for delivery, billed hourly.
• Billing runs against a pre-paid balance funded with AIOZ tokens; there is no free tier.
• Fall behind on payment and you get a 3-day grace period before your data is deleted.

How Much Does AIOZ Storage Actually Cost?

Two numbers, according to AIOZ's own pricing page: $17 per TB per month for storage, and $5 per TB for delivery (the bandwidth used when data is downloaded). That is the entire rate card. There are no per-request charges, no separate fees for API calls, and no tiered volume discounts published anywhere in AIOZ's documentation. What you store and what you serve are the only two things AIOZ Storage bills for.

How AIOZ Storage Billing Actually Works

Billing is pre-paid: you deposit funds into your account balance before you can use the service at all, and AIOZ's documentation states this directly, there is no post-paid invoice model here. Usage is metered hourly, not daily or monthly. Every hour, AIOZ calculates two things: the bandwidth you used for downloads in that hour, and the storage you currently occupy at that moment, and bills your balance accordingly.

The funding mechanism is a wallet, not a credit card. Every AIOZ Storage account gets a unique wallet address, and you transfer AIOZ tokens to it, which the platform converts into a billing balance at the current market rate. A "Pay with $AIOZ" option is presented on AIOZ's pricing page too, though the token-deposit-to-market-rate-balance flow described above is the mechanism AIOZ's own payment documentation actually walks through in detail. If you manage multiple sub-users under one root account, their usage rolls up and gets billed together against that same root balance, not tracked separately. AIOZ also offers a deposit-estimation tool that factors in your expected usage to help you figure out how much to fund upfront, though the documentation doesn't specify the exact inputs that tool uses.

A Real Cost Example

Here is the math for a mid-size workload: say you store 2TB and serve 1TB of downloads in a given month. Storage runs 2TB x $17/TB = $34. Delivery runs 1TB x $5/TB = $5. Total for the month: $39, plus whatever your account already owed in prior unpaid usage, which there shouldn't be any of if you're keeping your balance funded. Double the storage to 4TB with the same 1TB of delivery, and the bill becomes $68 + $5 = $73. Delivery scales independently of storage, so a storage-heavy, low-traffic bucket and a smaller bucket serving heavy download traffic can land on very different bills even at similar total cost.

What Happens If You Don't Pay

AIOZ Storage sets a minimum balance requirement equal to what your storage cost in the previous billing cycle. AIOZ's own documentation gives the example directly: if you were billed $100 for storage last cycle, your account needs to maintain at least $100 in balance to keep operating. Fall below that minimum, and your account gets temporarily locked, you can't upload or download, but your data stays intact and isn't touched yet.

That locked state isn't permanent. You get 3 days to settle your outstanding balance. If you don't, AIOZ Storage automatically deletes all data associated with the account. There's no extended grace period beyond that, and no documented way to request more time, so treat a locked account as an active deadline, not a pause button.

AIOZ Storage's Account Limits

Three hard limits apply per account, all published in AIOZ's usage-limit documentation: 100 buckets, 100 sub-users, and a rate limit of 100 requests per second. None of these are tied to a paid tier or plan, since AIOZ Storage doesn't have tiers to begin with, just the one pay-as-you-go rate card. If your application needs more than 100 requests per second sustained, that ceiling is worth testing against before you commit to a migration.

How AIOZ Storage Pricing Compares to AWS, Cloudflare R2, and Others

Against Amazon S3 Standard, at roughly $23/TB for storage and roughly $92/TB for the first tier of internet egress, AIOZ Storage's delivery pricing is the standout difference: $5/TB versus $92/TB is a real, dramatic gap. Storage is closer, $17/TB versus $23/TB, a meaningful but not overwhelming discount.

That AWS comparison is the strong case. Against the newer providers built specifically to undercut hyperscaler pricing, the picture is more mixed. Cloudflare R2 charges $15/TB for storage and, per its own pricing page, "does not incur data transfer (egress) charges" at all, beating AIOZ Storage on both numbers. Backblaze B2 runs roughly $6/TB for storage with mostly-free egress under its Bandwidth Alliance terms. Wasabi charges roughly $7/TB flat, with egress free up to a 1:1 ratio with stored volume. None of these three publish a per-request fee either, so AIOZ Storage isn't differentiated there.

Where does that leave the pitch? If you're comparing against AWS, the numbers do the talking on their own. If you're comparing against R2, B2, or Wasabi, price alone won't win the argument, so the case has to rest on something else, like the macaroon-based access grants and passphrase model covered elsewhere in this series, features none of those three ship in the same form.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does AIOZ Storage cost per TB?
$17 per TB per month for storage and $5 per TB for delivery (bandwidth), according to AIOZ's official pricing page. There are no per-request fees.

Does AIOZ Storage have a free tier?
No. Billing is pre-paid from the start, with no trial period or free storage allowance published in AIOZ's documentation.

How is AIOZ Storage usage metered?
Hourly. AIOZ calculates your bandwidth used for downloads and your current storage occupied every hour and bills your account balance accordingly.

What happens if my AIOZ Storage balance runs out?
Your account is locked once your balance falls below the minimum, which equals your previous cycle's storage cost. Your data is retained during the lock, but if you don't settle the balance within 3 days, AIOZ Storage deletes it automatically.

What are AIOZ Storage's account limits?
100 buckets per account, 100 sub-users per account, and a rate limit of 100 requests per second, regardless of how much you spend.

Is AIOZ Storage cheaper than AWS S3?
Yes, especially on delivery: roughly $5/TB versus AWS's roughly $92/TB for first-tier egress. Storage is a smaller gap, $17/TB versus roughly $23/TB.

Is AIOZ Storage the cheapest S3-compatible storage available?
No. Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2, and Wasabi all currently publish lower storage prices and, in R2's case, zero egress fees, undercutting AIOZ Storage on both storage and delivery cost.

Related Reading

• AIOZ Storage Explained: S3-Compatible Decentralized Storage - what AIOZ Storage is overall, including a first look at this same pricing data.
• AIOZ Storage Access Control: Macaroons and Access Grants - the security model behind AIOZ Storage's pricing pitch against cheaper competitors.
• Migrate from Amazon S3 to AIOZ Storage with rclone - the practical steps for moving a bucket over once the cost math works for you.
• AIOZ Storage vs AWS S3: The Full Pricing Comparison - the request fees, storage tiers, and cross-region costs AWS bills for that this hub doesn't cover.

References

• AIOZ Storage Documentation: Billing
• AIOZ Storage Documentation: Payment
• AIOZ Storage Documentation: Penalty
• Amazon S3 Pricing
• Cloudflare R2 Pricing