Cloudflare R2 is designed around a simple premise: you pay for storage and operations, but not for egress. This is huge for anyone serving user-generated content or running media-heavy applications. Compare S3's egress fees and watch your bill shrink.
Storage pricing is straightforward—$0.015 per GB per month gets you unlimited class A operations (writes, copies, lists) and class B operations (reads, retrieves). The API is S3-compatible, so migrating existing code is mostly changing endpoint URLs.
Performance is solid for most use cases. Put and get operations complete in milliseconds. For hot data, consider Workers + KV caching to reduce operation costs further. Archive storage, useful for compliance or backup scenarios, costs even less. The pricing calculator on Cloudflare's site makes projections easy.