Which storage provider should you use?

You bring the bucket. Here is what each of the three actually costs a photographer, and the catch in each one.

ArchiveSend never holds your photographs. They go into a cloud storage account that belongs to you, which means the one thing you have to do before sending anything is open that account. All three providers below work the same way once connected, and you can change your mind later.

Prices were checked in October 2026 and are for comparison, not a quote. Each name links to the provider's own pricing page.

Backblaze B2

Around $6.95 per TB a month, the cheapest of the three, with no minimum storage duration and the first 10GB free. Downloads are free up to three times what you store each month, then charged by the gigabyte.

The catch. That download allowance is generous but it is not unlimited. If you keep 200GB of finished work and a busy month has clients pulling 600GB of it, you start paying. Backblaze also has no CORS screen in its console, so the one setup step that needs it has to be done with their command line tool. ArchiveSend gives you the exact command to paste.

Wasabi

Around $7.99 per TB a month with no download fees and no request fees at all, however much your clients pull. Setup is the simplest of the three, and it allows browser uploads without the extra step the other two need.

The catch, and it is a real one for this work. Wasabi bills a minimum of 1TB a month whether you use it or not, so a photographer storing 80GB pays the same as one storing a terabyte. It also has a 90 day minimum storage duration: delete a gallery after three weeks and you are still billed for it as though it sat there for ninety days. If your habit is to deliver and then clear things out, that bites.

Amazon S3

Priced per GB with charges for downloads beyond the first 100GB a month, and for requests. It is the most expensive of the three for this kind of use and the fiddliest to set up, because permissions go through IAM.

Worth it when. You already run on AWS, or you need something the others do not have. If neither is true, the other two are cheaper and quicker.

So which one

If you are starting from nothing and want one answer: Backblaze B2. It is the cheapest, it does not charge you for a terabyte you are not using, and nothing is billed for ninety days after you delete it. The command line step for CORS is a one time annoyance and we walk you through it.

Pick Wasabi instead if you will genuinely keep a terabyte or more online, you keep deliveries up for months rather than weeks, and you would rather pay one flat number than watch a download meter.

What connecting actually involves

  1. Make a bucket with your provider and note its name and region.
  2. Create an access key with read and write permission on that bucket.
  3. Paste the two halves into ArchiveSend and save.

We write a tiny test file to the bucket and delete it again, so you find out whether the keys work while you are sitting there rather than when a client is waiting on a download. If something is wrong, the page says which of the four usual things it is.

Whichever you choose, the account is yours. If you leave ArchiveSend the files stay where they are and we lose our keys, which is the point of the arrangement.