Cloud archival storage — AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive ~$12/TB/yr; GCS Archive ~$14/TB/yr

Cloud archival storage prices establish the lower bound on Tier 1 storage cost. AWS S3 Glacier Instant Retrieval runs approximately $48 per TB-year ($4/TB-month); Glacier Deep Archive runs approximately $12 per TB-year ($1/TB-month). Google Cloud Storage Archive runs approximately $14 per TB-year ($0.0012/GB-month, multi-region US/EU after the 2026 price adjustment from $0.0040/GB-month).

For C-0006: at $12-$48 per TB-year, raw cloud archival storage is the cheapest option for the byte-storage component of preservation. What it does not provide is structural redundancy across independent failure domains, organizational independence, or verification capability — the architectural properties developed in M-0002 that distinguish Tier 1 from Tier 3. The price comparison is informative not because Tier 3 is cheaper than cloud storage on raw cost-per-byte (it is not, when the cloud option is operated as a single provider relationship), but because Tier 3 produces the resilience properties cloud storage cannot, on a budget that fits inside the same order of magnitude.