Cloudflare R2: Does it work?

Cloudflare made waves in the tech world when it announced R2, an object storage with zero egress fees.

For over a decade most devs and indie founders have used Amazon S3 for cloud storage. Those who couldn't afford S3 have used Wasabi or Backblaze. Those companies, however, have questionable pricing strategies.

We needed something cheaper that just worked. R2, which Cloudflare launched on September 2022, seemed very promising on these fronts.

So, does Cloudflare R2 work?

Surprisngly, I haven't seen anyone do a comprehensive review on Cloudflare R2.

If you search for it on YouTube, you'll see (almost) no review. Even searching through dev.to gave me only two matches.

So I decided to dive in on my own and see if it really works as advertised.

P.S. All of the images shown in this post are hosted on Cloudflare R2. I eat my own dog food.

Let's try Cloudflare R2

You can access Cloudflare R2 by going into your Cloudflare Dashboard.

If you've used Amazon S3, you'll notice a similar terminology: You can create various "buckets." You can then put your files into those buckets.

I've created an "indiehackers" bucket. After you open the bucket, you'll see an "Upload" button:

This allows you to upload files (or folders) directly from the interface:

After you upload a file, you can open it and you'll get an S3 URL and a public URL:

The public URL is exactly what it says... public. You can share those files, embed them if they're images (like I did in this post), etc.

What about geographical regions?

You can choose this setting when creating a bucket. By default, Cloudflare sets your region to Automatic, meaning that it "chooses a bucket location in the closest available region to the create bucket request based on the location of the caller.".

Managing R2 as an API

Cloudflare allows you to interact with it from the terminal using Wrangler, a command-line tool for building with Cloudflare products.

For example, the command for creating a bucket is:

wrangler r2 bucket create YOUR_BUCKET_NAME

The command for uploading a file is:

wrangler r2 object put test-bucket/dataset.csv --file=dataset.csv

So far, so good

All of the images I uploaded loaded fast (as you can see from this post). So far, I haven't encountered any "surprising" pricing.

So I can safely say that Cloudflare R2 works as advertised.

The pricing enables new business models

Here's the pricing page for Cloudflare R2:

Compare this to the pricing model for S3:

Almost $0.1 per gigabyte. Sure you get the first 100GB for free, but you can very easily exceed this limit if you host large files.

Cloudflare sounds like an exciting alternative because you can launch a side project connected to files/images without being startled with a large hosting price.

This is great for serial entrepreneurs.

Let's say you start 5 side projects and hope that one of them gets traction within the next 12 months. You work on and promote all of the projects in parallel and hope that one of them will find a product-market fit.

One year later, one of your side projects takes off. With a service like Cloudflare R2, you won't end up blowing your weekly salary on an unexpected hosting bill. Instead, you can just continue launching.