Zoom charges $1.50 for every gigabyte of cloud recording storage you add past a small tier. Amazon S3 charges $0.023. That is not a typo, and it is the arithmetic behind every "storage full" invoice that ever seemed high for a few dozen gigabytes of video.
Every list price below was checked against the vendor's own pricing page in the week this was published, and each one is linked — cloud prices move, and a cost comparison with a stale number in it is worse than no comparison at all.
What Zoom charges
Zoom publishes its add-on pricing on its cloud recording storage capacity page. The tiers, as listed there:
| Zoom add-on | Monthly price | Effective rate | Rate for an additional GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 GB | $10 | $0.33/GB/mo | $1.50/GB |
| 200 GB | $40 | $0.20/GB/mo | $1.50/GB |
| 1 TB | $100 | $0.10/GB/mo | $0.50/GB |
| 5 TB | $500 | $0.10/GB/mo | $0.10/GB |
Two things about that table matter more than the headline numbers.
You buy a tier, not a gigabyte. There is nothing between 30 GB and 200 GB, so an archive that has grown to 50 GB costs $40, not $16.50 — the 30 GB tier no longer fits and the next one up is the only thing that does.
The overage rate is the punitive one. Spilling 20 GB past the 30 GB tier at $1.50/GB costs $30 a month on top of the $10 — more than simply buying the 200 GB tier. That is by design, and it is the number people discover on an invoice rather than in advance.
This is on top of your Zoom plan, which already includes a pooled allowance — 10 GB per licensed user on most paid plans, 15 GB on Business Plus, unlimited on Enterprise. The add-on is what you buy when that pool fills.
What object storage charges
The same gigabyte, at four S3-compatible providers. All figures are list price, storage line only, and I come back to what that omits below.
| Provider / tier | Storage | Egress | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon S3 Standard (us-east-1, first 50 TB) | $0.023/GB/mo | $0.09/GB beyond AWS's account-wide 100 GB/mo free allowance | Also $0.005 per 1,000 uploads, $0.0004 per 1,000 reads |
| Amazon S3 Standard-Infrequent Access | $0.0125/GB/mo | as above | Plus $0.01/GB retrieval; 30-day minimum duration |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.004/GB/mo | as above | Plus $0.03/GB retrieval; 90-day minimum duration |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Deep Archive | $0.00099/GB/mo | as above | Restore takes hours to two days depending on tier; 180-day minimum duration |
| Cloudflare R2 Standard | $0.015/GB/mo | free | $4.50 per million writes, $0.36 per million reads; 10 GB/mo free |
| Backblaze B2 | $6.95/TB/mo (≈$0.00695/GB) | free up to 3× stored, then $0.01/GB | First 10 GB free |
| Wasabi | $7.99/TB/mo (≈$0.00799/GB) | free, no request fees | 1 TB monthly minimum and a 90-day minimum storage duration |
Against Zoom's cheapest published rate — $0.10/GB/month, reached at both the 1 TB and 5 TB tiers — S3 Standard is about four times cheaper and Glacier Instant Retrieval about twenty-five times cheaper. Against the rate a small account actually pays, the gap is an order of magnitude wider.
The same archive, priced five ways
Abstract per-gigabyte rates are easy to nod along to and hard to feel. So here is a real number, queried from our production database this week: across 334 accounts RecordFlow archives for, the mean archive is 46.2 GiB — about 50 GB as storage vendors count it. That is a working coach or trainer with a couple of years of sessions in it, not an outlier.
| Where those 50 GB live | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Zoom 200 GB add-on (the smallest tier that fits) | $40.00 | $480.00 |
| Amazon S3 Standard | $1.14 | $13.69 |
| Cloudflare R2 | $0.74 | $8.93 |
| Backblaze B2 | $0.34 | $4.14 |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $0.20 | $2.38 |
And at the top of our own range — the largest single archive we hold is just over 1,000 GiB, about 1,088 GB:
| Where ~1 TB lives | Per month | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| Zoom 1 TB add-on | $100.00 | $1,200.00 |
| Amazon S3 Standard | $25.02 | $300.21 |
| Cloudflare R2 | $16.32 | $195.79 |
| Backblaze B2 | $7.56 | $90.72 |
| Amazon S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval | $4.35 | $52.21 |
Those are ratios of roughly 35x (against S3 Standard) and 200x (against Glacier Instant Retrieval), on the same bytes, for an archive most people would describe as small.
What about the drive you already pay for?
For a lot of people the honest answer to "where should recordings live" is not a bucket at all. If you already pay for Google One, Microsoft 365 or Dropbox, or your employer pays for Google Workspace, you are already holding a couple of terabytes of storage that a recording archive barely dents — and the marginal cost of putting recordings there is genuinely zero until you fill it. Our Google Drive versus Zoom Cloud comparison works through that case, and the Microsoft 365 version does the same for OneDrive.
The reason to look at object storage instead is not that it is cheaper than a drive plan you already own. It is that a drive plan has a ceiling you periodically pay a vendor to raise, and object storage does not: it is priced per gigabyte, all the way up, with no plan to move to. If your archive is 40 GB and growing slowly, a consumer drive is the simpler and probably cheaper answer. If it is 400 GB and growing weekly, the per-gigabyte curve is where you want to be.
The part that actually lowers the bill
Here is what every version of this comparison gets wrong, including the ones that quote the numbers correctly.
Copying your recordings somewhere cheaper does not reduce your Zoom bill by a cent. A copy in S3 is a second copy. Zoom still holds the original, your pooled allowance is still full, and you are now paying for storage twice. You have made a backup, which is worth doing — but you have not made the bill smaller.
The bill only falls when recordings are archived and then removed from Zoom. That is the move that turns Zoom cloud storage from a permanent library, which you must keep buying, into a rolling buffer of the last few weeks, which you never have to buy again. The 50 GB in the table above stops being $40 a month of Zoom add-on and becomes $1.14 a month of S3 — but only if it leaves Zoom.
That is also the step people are right to be nervous about, because doing it by hand means deleting a recording on the strength of believing a copy exists somewhere. The safe version is mechanical, and it is the only order that works:
- Copy the recording out, every file — video, audio, transcript, chat.
- Verify it landed, by size, at the destination, not by assuming the upload returned successfully.
- Only then remove it from Zoom, and leave a grace period before you do, so a bad day doesn't cost you a client's session.
The safe sequence for deleting a Zoom recording after backing it up walks through the manual version of that. RecordFlow copies and verifies every recording automatically; turn on its opt-in auto-delete toggle and it clears the Zoom copy the same way, only after the backup is confirmed at the right byte count, and it does not get distracted halfway through. Files stream straight from Zoom to the storage you choose — RecordFlow never holds a copy on its own infrastructure in between.
So what should you actually do?
- Archive is under ~100 GB and you already pay for a cloud drive. Put recordings there, turn on verified deletion from Zoom, and stop buying Zoom storage. The cost of the archive is zero on top of what you already spend.
- Archive is large or growing fast, or you are an admin covering a whole team. Object storage is where the per-gigabyte curve stops hurting. S3 Standard or R2 if you might read recordings back; a cold tier if this is a compliance archive nobody opens.
- You are on Zoom Enterprise with unlimited storage. The cost argument does not apply to you. The durability one still does — Zoom's maximum auto-delete retention is finite, and an unlimited pool that expires is not an archive.
- Whatever you pick, delete from Zoom afterwards. That is the step that changes the invoice.
Archive it, verify it, then clear it from Zoom.
RecordFlow copies every Zoom cloud recording to storage you control and checks the copy landed at the right size — and, if you opt in, clears the Zoom copy only once that's confirmed, which is the step that actually lowers the bill. Off by default, yours to switch on. Setup takes about 60 seconds.
