Can I bypass the 90-day minimum?

No. Delete an object early and we bill the remaining storage as if it had stayed the full 90 days. We tell you in the API response, your dashboard, and on this page — so it's never a surprise.

Does Cold count as a "second region" backup?

Out of the box, no — it's in the same region as you put it. Enable cross-region replication ($0.005/GB one-time) and you have a second-region copy that satisfies most DR audit requirements.

What about ransomware / immutability?

Object Lock applies to Cold the same way as Standard — governance and compliance modes both supported. WORM-locked archives can't be deleted by anyone, including the bucket owner, until the lock expires.

Why is your retrieval cheaper than Glacier?

Honest answer: we run on cheaper hardware (high-density HDDs in dedicated archive racks), we don't bake in the cross-AZ replication tax most hyperscalers do, and we don't need to subsidize a million other services with this product.

Is there a free tier?

No, but the $100 starter credit covers about 25 TB-months — enough to evaluate with a real workload. We don't penalize you for deleting evaluation data inside the minimum. A credit card is required at sign-up for verification.

Cold storage · Archive · $0.004/GB

Cheap to keep,
honest about pulling it back.

About 3× cheaper than Object Standard for data you almost never read. We're upfront about the two costs everyone forgets: a 90-day minimum, and a retrieval fee when you actually want it back.

Create archive →Lifecycle from Object

Estimator

See both bills. The keep-it bill, and the get-it-back bill.

Cold storage looks cheap until you retrieve. Adjust the retrieval row below — most teams overestimate how often they'll actually pull data back.

Retrieval class

Archived dataWhat's sitting in the bucket

100500,000

$0.004/GB-month. 90-day minimum retention — delete sooner and you're billed for the remaining days.

Data retrieved per monthThe most-misunderstood number on cold-storage bills

GB/mo

010,000

A typical archive sees 0.5–2 % retrieval per month. If your number is higher than that, Object IA tier is likely cheaper overall.

Outbound traffic to internetOnce retrieved, what leaves NimbusNexus?

GB/mo

05,000

$0.01/GB. Free if the retrieval lands in another NimbusNexus service in the same region (back-fill into Object, restore to a VM, etc).

Planned retentionHow long you intend to keep this data

months

3120

Used for the savings projection on the right. Cold gets cheaper the longer you hold — most regulatory archives live 7+ years.

90-day minimum retention. Delete an object before 90 days and you're charged for the remaining days at the storage rate. Same rule on every cold-storage product anywhere — we just say so out loud.

Decision aid

Cold isn't always the right answer.

Cold makes sense when…

Compliance retention (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX records ≥ 7 years)

Backup of backups — 30-day-old daily snapshots that nobody touches

Raw masters in media production: keep originals, work from proxies

Data lake history: hot last quarter on Object, prior years in Cold

Legal hold and discovery archives — exists, not browsed

Cold is the wrong answer when…

You touch > 2 % of the archive per month — IA tier costs less overall

You need first-byte latency under a few hours (use Object Standard)

You'll keep it less than 3 months — minimum retention catches you

It's the live working set for a service or scheduled job

You need filesystem semantics — block storage is the right tool

Lifecycle

Set it once. Pay less from then on.

A lifecycle rule is the right way to use cold storage — automatically transition stale objects from Object → Cold → expire, on a schedule that matches how your data ages.

Typical aging policy for backups

Day 0

Standard$0.013/GB · month

Just written. Read-heavy: most restores happen here.

Day 30

IA$0.007/GB · month

Read drops sharply. Move to IA for half the cost.

Day 90

Cold$0.004/GB · month

Beyond the regulator-curiosity window. Archive.

Day 2,555

Expire$0.000/GB · month

After 7 years (or whatever your policy says), delete.

# Same rule as JSON, applied to my-bucket

{

"prefix": "backups/",

"transitions": [

{ "days": 30, "to": "IA" },

{ "days": 90, "to": "Cold" }

"expiration": { "days": 2555 }

}

$ nn bucket lifecycle apply my-bucket policy.json

✓ rule applied · 1.2 M objects matched · est. savings $455/mo

Vs other archive tiers

50 TB stored, 500 GB retrieved per month.

A real-world archive workload, four invoices.

Line item	NimbusNexus Cold	AWS Glacier IR	GCP Archive	Azure Archive
50 TB stored / mo	$200	$200	$60	$51
500 GB retrieval (Std)	$10	$5	$25	$11
500 GB internet egress	$5	$46	$48	$46
Min-retention penalty	90 days	90 days	365 days	180 days
First-byte latency (Std)	4–12h	~12h	hours	hours
Recurring monthly	$215	$251	$133	$108

Hyperscalers win on raw stored $/GB but charge harder for retrieval and lock you in for a year. We trade a bit on storage for a much shorter minimum and a lower egress rate — better for archives you might actually need to read.

FAQ

Cold storage questions.

You issue a `restore-object` call. The data is staged in a hot bucket where you can `GET` it for the next 7 days. Most jobs complete in 4–8 hours; pathological cases (millions of tiny objects) take longer.