Pricing
Three numbers. Nothing else.
One price for storage. Nothing to move your data. A small optional fee if you want us to deliver it for you.
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.
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.
How billing works
- Storage is metered hourly and billed monthly as TB-months.
- Delete anything, any time; you stop paying that hour.
- Delivery tool fees appear per delivery on your invoice.
- Invoices in USD; card or bank transfer.
Questions
Is the $1 per TB a transfer or egress fee?
No. Egress is $0 always. The $1 pays for the compute that runs our push tool and writes the manifest and checksums. Share a link instead and pay nothing.
Is Afferent hot or cold storage?
Hot, always. Every byte is instantly readable — no tiers, no retrieval fees, no restore delays. Training data gets previewed, pulled and delivered, so we price for data that moves: $9 / TB-month covers reading it as often as you like.
Isn't a cold tier on a hyperscaler cheaper?
Per terabyte sitting still, yes. But cold tiers charge retrieval fees and restore waits the moment you touch the data, and hyperscaler egress runs up to $120 / TB on top. Delivering 50 TB from Amazon S3 costs ~$4,500 in egress alone — about ten months of storing those same terabytes here.
What about zero-egress buckets with infrequent-access tiers?
Their cheap tiers charge for every read — typically around $10 per TB retrieved — plus 30-day minimum storage and per-request fees across millions of files. Deliver a dataset twice and the saving is gone. And a raw bucket is still just a bucket: the catalog, consent records, signed manifests, share links and licence ledger are yours to build.
What counts as a terabyte-month?
1 TB stored for a full month. 2 TB for half a month is the same. We meter hourly and sum.
Is there a minimum retention period?
No. Delete at any time.
Do you charge for API requests or retrievals?
No.
Can my buyer pull data without an account?
Yes. Share links work with a browser, rclone or any S3-compatible client.
Do you ever sell, license or take a cut of my data?
Never. Afferent is infrastructure. The deal is yours.