Cloud storage versus a NAS: the honest cost comparison

Under about 6TB, cloud storage wins on money and you can stop reading here: Microsoft 365 Family is $129.99 a year for 1TB each across six people, and iCloud+ from the 2TB tier upward runs about $60 per TB per year. Above roughly 8TB the arithmetic flips, because object storage at $59.50 to $95.88 per TB per year bills you $476 to $767 annually and never stops, while hardware bought once clears its own cost in two to three years.

What cloud storage actually costs per TB per year

Every price below came off the vendor's own pricing page in July 2026. Vendors quote per GB or per TB per month. The annual per-TB column is the only one that compares against a box on a shelf.

Notice where the two small iCloud+ tiers land. The 50GB plan looks like pocket change at $0.99 a month and costs $237.60 per TB per year, four times the rate of the 2TB plan. Small tiers are never cheap storage. They are cheap because they are small.

Four traps live in that table. Microsoft 365 Family's 6TB is six separate 1TB allocations across six Microsoft accounts, described on Microsoft's own page as "Up to 6 TB of secure cloud storage (1 TB per person)", so it is only that cheap if five other people genuinely use it. iDrive e2's advertised $29.75 is a first-year half-price promotion, the renewal is $59.50, and a $6 minimum charge per billing cycle applies even if you store almost nothing. Cloudflare's per-TB figures assume a decimal terabyte of 1,000 GB, because R2 bills per GB-month, so a 1,024 GB binary TB costs 2.4 percent more than the row says. And R2 Infrequent Access is not the bargain its storage price implies: Cloudflare adds a $0.01 per GB data retrieval charge plus a 30-day minimum storage duration, so an object you delete on day three still bills for thirty.

Wasabi carries the same trap in a longer form. Its pricing FAQ states that on the pay-as-you-go model, objects deleted before 90 days incur "a Timed Deleted Storage charge equal to the storage charge for the remaining days." If your workflow writes and deletes constantly, $95.88 is not what you will actually pay.

Backblaze B2 Reserve appears here because it marks the floor of this market at $78 per TB per year, sold as a $19,500 annual bundle for 250TB. Nobody reading this is buying 250TB. The realistic household range is $60 to $96 per TB per year.

AWS and Azure sit outside the table deliberately. AWS renders its S3 storage price tables in JavaScript and would not surrender them to a direct fetch, so the widely repeated $0.023 per GB-month for S3 Standard in US East is not a figure this article confirmed against AWS itself. Check it there before planning around it. Azure's Blob Storage page returned literal "$-" placeholders without a region cookie. Neither is a sane choice for personal bulk storage anyway, for the reason two sections down.

What a NAS costs to run

Synology publishes a whole-unit wattage per model, which is the number you want. The 2-bay DS224+ draws 14.69W in access mode and 4.41W in HDD hibernation. The 4-bay DS425+ draws 28.25W and 6.10W. Both run the same Intel Celeron J4125. Synology's methodology page would not render for verification, so treat these as vendor bench figures rather than measurements from your own shelf.

Run them against the EIA's May 2026 US residential average of 18.44 cents per kWh, released 2026-07-23. A 2-bay costs roughly $7 a year if it sleeps nearly always and roughly $24 if it never sleeps. A 4-bay lands between $10 and $46. Your rate is not the national average. Hawaii and much of the Northeast run far above 18.44 cents, parts of the Pacific Northwest well below, so scale accordingly.

Power is the easy part. Upfront cost is where most comparison articles quietly invent a number. Synology and QNAP publish no price on their own product pages, and essentially every retailer listing worth checking blocks automated reads, so this article will not pretend to one. Price your own build live, then run that figure through the table below instead of trusting somebody's 2023 review.

Break-even, in years

Assume 8TB you want kept, a 4-bay NAS running continuously at Synology's access figure ($46 a year in power), and the cloud costs above. Break-even is upfront hardware spend divided by the annual saving after power.

Read the last column again. Against a Microsoft 365 Family subscription you already pay for, a NAS never pays back inside the working life of its drives. Against object storage at 8TB, it pays back before the warranty expires. The entire decision turns on one question: do you have more data than the cheap consumer tiers hold?

The table excludes drive replacement, because no 2026 retail price for a NAS-rated drive could be verified for this piece. Budget one replacement inside five years and every number in it moves right.

Egress is the bill you find out about during a disaster

Pulling data back down is where the hyperscalers separate from the storage specialists. AWS gives 100GB of internet egress free per month, aggregated across all services and regions, and its own pricing example puts the rate after that at $0.09 per GB out of Europe (Ireland). Azure gives the same 100GB free, then charges $0.087/GB on premium routing for North America and Europe, tapering to $0.05/GB by the 350TB tier, or $0.08 down to $0.04/GB on transit ISP routing.

Restore 8TB after a house fire and the arithmetic turns ugly. On AWS, 7,900 chargeable GB at $0.09 is $711 in transfer fees on top of the storage you already paid for. On Azure premium routing, $687. Backblaze B2 and iDrive e2 both give free egress up to three times your stored volume per month, so 8TB stored buys 24TB of free retrieval and the same restore costs nothing. Wasabi charges nothing for egress or API requests. R2 Standard charges nothing either.

That is exactly why B2, Wasabi, e2 and R2 put egress terms in their headline pricing while AWS and Azure bury theirs on a separate bandwidth page. One rule outlives every price change above: never put a personal backup somewhere that meters the restore.

Upload time, which nobody budgets

A NAS fills at LAN speed. Cloud fills at whatever your ISP gives you upstream, and that is a different order of magnitude. The arithmetic is fixed. 8TB is 64,000,000 megabits, so a sustained 20 Mbps upload needs about 37 days of continuous transfer, 100 Mbps about 7.4 days, and 1 Gbps about 17.8 hours.

Find your real number before committing. Cable and DOCSIS connections are asymmetric by design and provision far less upstream than downstream, while fiber PON and point-to-point Ethernet are commonly symmetric or close to it. Every source for a current median upload speed refused automated fetching for this piece, so no typical figure is quoted here. Check your own plan's published upload rate, or run a test. The first seed of a multi-terabyte backup is measured in weeks, not an evening.

What each one does badly

Cloud products change shape underneath you. Google's 2TB and 5TB Google One tiers are now sold as Google AI Plus and Google AI Pro, bundled with Gemini usage allowances, at €9.99 and €21.99 a month on the plans page as fetched in July 2026. That page resolved to euro pricing despite a US-locale request, so the dollar figures stay unconfirmed here. A storage subscription became an AI subscription that happens to include storage, which is the argument for checking price on the day you buy, not the day you read.

On the NAS side, drive failure is real and it is not uniform. Backblaze's full-year 2025 Drive Stats covers 344,196 drives across 30 models and puts fleet-wide annualized failure rate at 1.36 percent, improved from 1.55 percent in 2024. Those are reassuring numbers. Then look at the quarterly table in the same report: for Q4 2025 Backblaze flagged the 8TB HGST HUH728080ALE600 at 10.29 percent AFR, with a working theory of vibration sensitivity in a cohort about 7.5 years old. A four-drive array bought as one box from one batch does not get to average itself out across 30 models. Buy across at least two batches, and confirm your enclosure's scrub or data-integrity check is actually scheduled and running. A silent failure found during a restore is not a backup.

The supply picture behind those drives shifted hard in 2026. Seagate's Q3 FY2026 results, reported 2026-04-29, show revenue of $3.11 billion, up 44 percent year over year, with gross margin at 46.5 percent against 41.6 percent the prior quarter. Of the 199 exabytes shipped that quarter, datacenter customers took 88 percent of exabyte shipments and 80 percent of revenue, and Seagate raised its annual revenue growth target from the low-to-mid teens to a minimum of 20 percent. Manufacturing capacity is being reallocated toward hyperscalers. That is the sourced mechanism behind thin retail NAS drive supply, so price the drives before you price the enclosure, not after.

One thing is worth saying plainly. A NAS in your house is one copy in one building. RAID rebuilds a failed disk, it does not undo a deletion, a ransomware run across an SMB share, or a fire. If the NAS wins your break-even math, buy it and then keep paying for the cheapest egress-free tier that holds the subset you genuinely cannot replace. At $83.40 per TB per year on B2, 500GB of photos and documents costs about $42 a year to keep off-site, which is the cheapest insurance anywhere in this article.