cost-comparison

Stop Paying Rent to Move Your Own Files

Mar 9, 2026

The Trap

You uploaded 2 TB of photos, videos, and backups to the cloud. Life was good — until you wanted to move them somewhere else.

Suddenly, you’re hit with egress fees, per-GB migration charges, and the realization that your cloud provider has been counting on you never leaving. It’s your data. But moving it costs real money — every single time.

AWS charges ~$0.09/GB for egress. That’s $184 just to download 2 TB of your own files. Want to use a SaaS migration tool? That’s another $10–20/month, with transfer caps. Prefer the open-source CLI route? Clear your afternoon — you’ll need it for YAML configs, credential files, and provider-specific quirks.

The trap: cloud providers charge you egress fees, SaaS tools charge subscriptions, and CLI tools cost you hours of setup time

The Math

Let’s talk real numbers. Over three years, here’s what you’ll pay using common approaches:

Approach	3-Year Cost	Catch
SaaS Migration Tool	~$360	Monthly sub + data caps
Per-GB Service	~$720+	$0.03/GB, billed every transfer
DIY with CLI	40+ hours	Config per provider, no UI, breaks silently
Blober	One payment	Unlimited transfers. Forever.

The subscription model is designed to extract value from you month after month. The per-GB model punishes you for having more data. The CLI path trades money for your time.

Blober breaks the cycle. Pay once. Transfer as much as you want, as many times as you want. No meter running. No renewal emails. No “upgrade to unlock more.”

$Cost comparison over 3 years: SaaS tools cost $360, per-GB services cost $720+, DIY CLI costs 40+ hours, Blober costs one single payment$

The Escape

Blober is a desktop app — not a SaaS, not a CLI tool, not a cloud service. It runs on your Mac, Windows, or Linux machine and connects directly to your cloud providers:

AWS S3 — buckets and objects, any region
Azure Blob Storage — containers and blobs
Google Drive — files and folders, including shared drives
GoPro Cloud — back up your action footage locally or to any cloud
Backblaze B2 — the affordable S3 alternative
Dropbox — personal and business accounts
Cloudflare R2 — zero-egress object storage
Wasabi — hot storage without the cold fees
DigitalOcean Spaces — all regions, auto-detected
Local Disk — any folder on your machine

Your files never touch a middleman server. Blober streams directly between your machine and the provider APIs. Browse your cloud storage visually, select what you want, pick a destination — done.

If a transfer gets interrupted (bad WiFi, laptop closed, provider hiccup), Blober picks up where it left off. No re-uploading. No duplicate files.

Blober connects 10+ cloud providers in one app: AWS S3, Azure Blob, Google Drive, GoPro Cloud, Backblaze B2, Dropbox, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, DigitalOcean Spaces, and local disk

The Move

Here’s what switching to Blober actually looks like:

Before: You’re juggling browser tabs, CLI sessions, and a spreadsheet tracking which files went where. A SaaS tool emails you that you’ve hit your 1.2 TB monthly cap. You Google “rclone config azure” for the third time.

After: You open Blober. Connect your accounts. Drag from source to destination. Walk away. It just works.

No account required to transfer. No internet needed for local-to-local moves. No data ever leaves your machine unless you’re sending it to a cloud provider you chose.

Before and after comparison: monthly subscriptions, data caps, and files routed through servers vs. one-time payment, unlimited transfers, and 100% local execution with Blober

Who Is This For?

Photographers & videographers moving terabytes of footage from GoPro Cloud or Google Drive to cheaper archival storage
Developers & DevOps engineers migrating between S3-compatible providers without writing scripts
Small businesses consolidating cloud storage without paying an enterprise migration service
Privacy-conscious users who want their files transferred directly, not through a third-party cloud
Anyone tired of paying monthly fees to tools that move files you already own

Get Blober

Your data. Your machine. Your rules.

One payment. Unlimited transfers. No expiration.

Download Blober → blober.io

Migrating 100M+ Files from DigitalOcean Spaces to Backblaze B2

Feb 28, 2026

The Scenario

A media company has 25TB of data spread across 120 million files in DigitalOcean Spaces. Monthly bill: roughly $500/month. They want to move everything to Backblaze B2 to cut costs and get more flexibility.

This is a real-world pattern we see a lot. Let’s walk through what it actually takes.

What It Costs

Item	Details	Estimated Cost
Blober License	One-time purchase	$39
DigitalOcean Egress	~24TB billable at $0.01/GiB (first 1TB free)	~$240
Backblaze Ingress	Free. Backblaze never charges for uploads	$0
Backblaze API Calls	Uploads are free Class A calls, minor listing costs	~$2
Total		~$281

After migrating, the monthly bill drops from ~$500 on DigitalOcean to ~$150 on Backblaze B2. The entire migration pays for itself in about two weeks.

About Egress Fees

This is where it gets interesting. Backblaze actively wants people to switch to their platform and they back that up with real programs:

Free egress up to 3x your average monthly storage on B2, which means once you’re on Backblaze, downloading your own data doesn’t cost extra in most scenarios.
Unlimited free egress through CDN and compute partners like Cloudflare, Fastly, Bunny.net, and Vultr.
Assisted data migration is listed as a standard B2 feature on their pricing page.
Universal Data Migration is available for larger committed contracts (50TB+ on pay-as-you-go, or included with B2 Reserve annual plans).

Backblaze explains their philosophy well in this blog post: Cloud Egress Fees: What They Are and How to Reduce Them. The short version is that they believe egress fees are vendor lock-in, and they want to make switching easy.

Even if your dataset is under the 50TB threshold, it’s worth contacting their sales team. With a 25TB dataset and willingness to commit for 12 months, there’s a solid chance they’ll help reduce or cover the DigitalOcean egress fees to get you onboarded.

How Long Does It Take

Let’s be honest here. 25TB is a lot of data.

Every file needs its own set of API calls: list from the source, download, then upload to the destination. Each round-trip carries network latency regardless of file size. When you multiply that per-object overhead across 120 million files with 25TB of bandwidth on top, the aggregate time adds up fast.

For a client-side migration where data streams through your local machine, you’re looking at:

Several weeks of continuous runtime depending on your connection speed and latency
Your machine needs to stay on and connected the entire time
If your ISP has a monthly data cap, 25TB will almost certainly exceed it
16GB+ RAM recommended for handling the file listing at this scale

This isn’t a Blober limitation. Any client-side tool (rclone, Cyberduck, whatever) will face the same physics. Data has to travel from DigitalOcean’s datacenter to your machine, then from your machine to Backblaze’s datacenter. That’s two full trips through your ISP.

The Smart Approach: Two Phases

Phase 1: Let the Datacenters Do the Heavy Lifting

Contact Backblaze’s sales team and ask about their assisted migration options. For datasets at this scale, they partner with migration services that can move data directly between datacenters at speeds your home connection can’t match. What takes weeks on a home connection can take hours on a datacenter link.

Reach out here: Backblaze Sales

Phase 2: Use Blober for Everything After

Once the initial bulk migration is done, Blober becomes your daily tool for managing files across providers. New uploads, folder syncs, log rotations, moving files between buckets, all handled from your desktop with no per-GB fees and no subscriptions. Your credentials stay on your machine and never touch a third-party server.

Monthly Cost Comparison (Post-Migration)

	DigitalOcean Spaces	Backblaze B2
Storage (25TB)	~$500/mo	~$150/mo
Egress (3TB/mo)	~$30/mo	Free (within 3x allowance)
Total	~$530/mo	~$150/mo
Annual	~$6,360/yr	~$1,800/yr

That’s about $4,500 saved per year, every year.

Bottom Line

For large-scale one-time migrations, use Backblaze’s own migration programs. They want your business and they’ll often help you get there.

For everything after that, Blober gives you a one-time $39 license to manage, sync, and move files across any supported provider, with no recurring costs and no third party ever touching your credentials.

The True Cost of Cloud Data Migration in 2026

Feb 15, 2026

The Hidden Tax on Moving Your Own Data

Moving data between cloud providers should be simple. You own the files - you just want them somewhere else. But the cloud industry has turned data migration into a profit center, layering fees at every step: egress charges, per-GB migration fees, monthly subscriptions, and data traffic caps.

Here’s what cloud data migration actually costs in 2026, and why Blober’s one-time pricing model is a fundamentally better deal for anyone who transfers data more than once.

The Three Cost Models

1. Per-GB Fees (Flexify.io)

Flexify charges a per-GiB fee for every migration, on top of your cloud provider’s egress charges.

Migration Size	Flexify Fee (~$0.03/GiB)	Provider Egress (AWS ~$0.09/GB)	Total
100 GB	$3	$9	~$12
1 TB	$30	$92	~$122
10 TB	$307	$922	~$1,229
100 TB	$3,072	$9,216	~$12,288

These are per-job costs. Run the same migration next month? Pay again. Sync regularly? The meter never stops.

Flexify does offer managed migrations for 10+ TB where provider egress may be avoided through direct peering - but those require contacting sales and negotiating custom pricing.

2. Annual Subscriptions with Data Caps (MultCloud)

MultCloud charges an annual subscription that includes a fixed amount of transfer traffic:

Plan	Annual Cost	Data Allowance	Cost Per TB Transferred
Free	$0	5 GB/month	N/A (60 GB/year cap)
1,200 GB plan	$59.99/year	1,200 GB/year	~$50/TB
2,400 GB plan	$99.98/year	2,400 GB/year	~$42/TB

Hit the cap? Transfers stop until you renew. Need to move 5 TB? You’ll need to buy the top-tier plan and wait over two years to exhaust the quota - or pay for multiple years upfront.

Over three years, MultCloud costs $180–$300 in subscriptions alone, and you’re still capped on how much data you can actually move.

3. One-Time License (Blober)

Blober charges a one-time license fee. No per-GB charges. No annual renewal. No data caps.

Migration Size	Blober Cost	Provider Egress (your standard cloud fees)
100 GB	✅ One-time license	Standard egress only
1 TB	✅ Same license	Standard egress only
10 TB	✅ Same license	Standard egress only
100 TB	✅ Same license	Standard egress only

The only variable cost is your cloud provider’s standard egress fee - which you’d pay with any tool, including rclone. There is no Blober surcharge.

The Compounding Problem

Per-GB fees and subscriptions compound over time. If you migrate data regularly - monthly syncs, media archives, backup rotations - the cost gap widens fast:

Scenario	Flexify (per-GB)	MultCloud (subscription)	Blober (one-time)
One 1 TB migration	~$122	$59.99/year	✅ One-time
Monthly 500 GB sync	~$732/year	Exceeds cap	✅ One-time
3 years of regular use	$2,196+	$180–$300	✅ One-time

For users who transfer data as part of their regular workflow - not a one-time event - subscription and per-GB models are an ongoing tax. Blober eliminates it.

What About rclone?

rclone is free and open-source. On raw cost, nothing beats free.

But rclone’s cost is measured in time, not money:

Setup time - configuring remotes, flags, and cron jobs
Debugging time - when a transfer fails silently or a flag is wrong
Maintenance time - updating scripts when providers change APIs

For engineers who already live in the terminal, rclone is excellent. For everyone else, the time cost is significant and ongoing. Blober trades a one-time purchase for a visual, persistent workflow engine that eliminates scripting overhead entirely.

Egress Fees: The Unavoidable Cost

Regardless of which tool you use, cloud provider egress fees apply when downloading data. These are charged by your cloud provider, not by Blober:

Provider	Storage (TB/mo)	Egress (per GB)	Notes
AWS S3	$26	$0.09	Egress-heavy workloads get expensive
Azure Blob Storage	$20	$0.08	First 100 GB/month free
Google Cloud Storage	$23	$0.11	Varies by region
Backblaze B2	$6	Free (up to 3x)	Free egress up to 3x stored
Wasabi	$6.99	Free	No egress fees ever
Cloudflare R2	$15	Free	Zero egress by design
DigitalOcean Spaces	$5 (250 GB)	$0.01	1 TB outbound included

Pro tip: If you’re choosing a destination for long-term storage, providers like Backblaze B2 ($6/TB/mo, free egress), Wasabi ($6.99/TB/mo, no egress fees), and Cloudflare R2 (zero egress) offer significantly lower total cost of ownership than AWS, Azure, or GCS. Blober supports all of them.

TL;DR

Tool	Cost Model	Best For
Flexify.io	Per-GB + egress	Enterprise one-time migrations
MultCloud	Annual subscription	Light, occasional consumer transfers
rclone	Free (time cost)	Engineers comfortable with CLI
Blober	One-time license	Anyone who transfers data regularly, values simplicity, or needs GoPro Cloud support

If you transfer data more than once - or plan to - a one-time license pays for itself after a single job. No subscriptions. No per-GB surprises. No data caps.

Get Blober →