Data infrastructure for physical AI
Store the real world.
Deliver it anywhere.
Storage, a searchable catalog and zero-egress delivery for teams that record egocentric video and sensor data to train robots.
$9 / TB-month · $0 egress · optional delivery tool $1 / TB
- 50 TBto a buyer in hours
- $0 egresson every pull
- One linkshows your whole library
- Manifest + checksumson every delivery
Recording the data is the hard part. Keeping it, finding it and handing it over shouldn't be.
SD cards, SSDs and hard drives
One copy on a shelf. No index, no health checks, no idea what's where. Shipping it takes weeks.
Amazon S3, Google Cloud, Azure Blob
$90 per TB in egress every time you hand data to a buyer.
Google Drive, Dropbox, TeraBox
Throttled, capped, no API. 50 TB takes 50 days to get out.
Three jobs. One place to do them. ↓
01 / Store
Flat-price storage for raw sensor data.
Upload straight from the card. One price per terabyte-month. No request fees, no retrieval tiers, no egress. Delete when a deal closes; pay only for what you hold.
02 / Catalog
Know what you have. Show it in one link.
Every upload becomes a tagged session: scene, task, device, participant, consent, duration, usable hours, licence status. Search your library in seconds. Your public partner profile shows buyers what you hold — share one URL instead of a folder of screenshots. Buyers contact you directly. We never sell your data.
Kaveri Field Data
Bengaluru, IN · 1,312 usable hours · 2 devices
Hours by scene
Devices
Samples
03 / Deliver
Hand off 50 TB in hours, not weeks.
Pick sessions, name the destination, go. We push into your buyer's bucket with a signed manifest and per-file checksums, and log every delivery. Or share a link and let them pull — free, any volume.
The delivery tool is optional. Its $1 per TB is a fee for the compute that runs the push — not egress and not a transfer charge. Prefer your own tooling? Share a link and pull with rclone or your cloud CLI for $0.
- Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, Cloudflare R2
- Raw files + manifest, or LeRobot / RLDS layouts
- Resumable, verified on arrival, logged
Your library
on Afferent
1,312 usable hrs
Select sessions
212 usable hrs
38 sessions
Your buyer's bucket
s3:// · gs:// · az:// · r2://
manifest.json · sha256
Every alternative, honestly
Storage is one row. Transfer fees, delivery and management are the rest of the table.
Public list prices and documented limits, October 2026. Every option looks cheap on the storage row. Transfer fees, delivery time, file caps, account terms and a catalog you can search are where the real cost sits.
SD cards, SSDs & drives
~$1.5 / TB
One copy, one location. A courier is your network: 1–3 weeks per delivery.
TeraBox
~$1.75 / TB
Priced for quota nobody uses. Throttled to ~90 Mbps: 50 TB takes ~52 days to leave.
MEGA
~$3 / TB
Transfer quota equals storage. Encrypted proprietary SDK; nothing to build or deliver from.
Google Drive / Dropbox
$4–10 / TB
Built for documents. 750 GB per user per day upload caps; API throttling at scale.
Amazon S3
$23 / TB
Excellent storage. $90 per TB to hand it to anyone outside AWS.
Google Cloud Storage
$20 / TB
$120 per TB egress — the most expensive exit in the industry.
Azure Blob
$16.50 / TB
$87 per TB egress. No S3-compatible API.
Hugging Face
$18 / TB
Great for public samples. No private push to a buyer's bucket, 500 GB file cap, throttled pulls.
| Physical | Consumer cloud | Hyperscaler | Open hub | Afferent | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Criteria | SD cards, SSDs & drives | TeraBox | MEGA | Drive / Dropbox | Amazon S3 | Google Cloud | Azure Blob | Hugging Face | Afferent |
| Store | |||||||||
| Storage, per TB-month | ~$1.5, single copy | ~$1.75 | ~$3 | $4–10 per seat | $23 | $20 | $16.50 | $18 private | $9 |
| Durability / SLA | Single drive, no SLA | "As is", no liability | Consumer, no SLA | Consumer, no SLA | 11 nines | 11 nines | 11–16 nines | None | 11 nines, enterprise terms |
| Account & file caps | — | 2 TB per account · 500–50k files | 20 TB per account | 2–5 TB per seat | None | None | None | <100k files per repo · 128 files/min | None |
| Max file size | — | 4 GB free · 20–128 GB paid | — | 5 TB | 5 TB | 5 TB | 190 TB | 500 GB hard · 20 GB recommended | 10 TB |
| Transfer | |||||||||
| Data transfer out, per TB | Courier: $200–1,100 per drive | $0, throttled | ~$3 beyond quota | $0, API-throttled | $90 | $120 | $87 | $0 up to 8× stored | $0 |
| Deliver 50 TB to one buyer | 1–3 weeks, 3 drives | ~52 days, 1–5 files at a time | Days–weeks, quota-bound | Weeks; per-user daily caps | Hours, ~$4,500 egress | Hours, ~$6,000 egress | Hours, ~$4,350 egress | 6–24 h if the buyer tunes concurrency | Hours, $0 |
| Buyer can pull with their own tools | No | Browser only | Client app only | Browser / throttled API | Yes | Yes | Yes | CLI / S3 gateway, throttled | Yes — link, CLI or S3 |
| Deliver | |||||||||
| Push into the buyer's bucket (S3 / GCS / Azure) | No | No | No | No | Same cloud only | Same cloud only | Same cloud only | No — buyer pulls | Any cloud |
| Checksums + signed manifest | Do it yourself | None | None | None | Do it yourself | Do it yourself | Do it yourself | None | Every delivery, sha256 per file |
| Commercial-use terms | — | Consumer terms; stacking accounts breaches them | Consumer / Pro Flexi | Seats are for people, not storage | Yes | Yes | Yes | Public-first | Yes |
| Works at 50 TB+ | Barely | No | No | No | Yes, at $90/TB out | Yes, at $120/TB out | Yes, at $87/TB out | Partly | Yes |
| Manage | |||||||||
| Catalog: scene, task, device, usable hours | Folder names | Folder names | Folder names | Filename search | Build it yourself | Build it yourself | Build it yourself | Public dataset cards | Built in |
| Who licensed what, exclusivity | Spreadsheet | None | None | None | Build it yourself | Build it yourself | Build it yourself | None | Licence ledger |
| S3-compatible API | No | None | Proprietary SDK | Drive API | Yes | Yes | No | Partial gateway | Yes |
| Provenance a lab's procurement will accept | If encrypted | Baidu lineage, data location disputed; often refused | No SLA to cite | Acceptable | Yes | Yes | Yes | Public-first terms | Audited provider, documented region, provenance record |
The one limit that stops a dataset being delivered.
List prices and published limits as of October 2026. Egress figures are to the public internet from US regions. Throughput figures are from independent published tests.
The cheap options can't deliver. The ones that can deliver charge you to leave. Afferent is the only column that does both at $9 per TB.
What a month actually costs.
Storage plus data transfer out. Same scenario, three providers.
Afferent
$450
$9 / TB stored · $0 transfer
Amazon S3
$19,150
$23 / TB stored + $90 / TB egress
Hugging Face
$900
$18 / TB · no private push to your buyer
Optional: push with our delivery tool for $1 / TB — $200 for this scenario — or pull via a shared link for $0.
Next: validation reports · automated captioning and tagging · labelling tools.
Pricing
Three numbers. Nothing else.
Storage
$0.009 / GB-month
= $9 / TB-month
First 1 TB free. No request or retrieval fees.
Data transfer out
$0
No egress, any volume, any destination. Share a link; buyers pull free.
Delivery tool (optional)
$0.001 / GB
= $1 / TB
A compute fee for our push tool: manifest, checksums, delivery log, straight into your buyer's bucket. Not a transfer charge. Use your own tooling and pay nothing.
No seats. No tiers. No minimums. Cancel any time.
Partners
Built for the people who collect the data.
Afferent is infrastructure, not a marketplace. We never sell your data, never take a commission and never see your buyers. Your profile shows what you hold; the deal is yours.
Kaveri Field Data
Bengaluru, IN
Mekong Capture Co.
Ho Chi Minh City, VN
Northfield Capture
Leeds, UK