AWS S3 standard storage costs $0.023 per gigabyte per month. eDiscovery vendors charge $10–$40. Here is what the per-GB fee actually includes, what it silently excludes, and what the all-in alternative looks like.
AWS S3 standard storage costs $0.023 per gigabyte per month. Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage are within a few cents. These are the infrastructure rates that every eDiscovery platform — whether Relativity, Everlaw, CS Disco, or any self-serve alternative — pays to store your documents. They are public, auditable, and have been declining for a decade.
For a 100 GB matter hosted for six months, the underlying storage cost at commodity cloud rates is approximately $13.80. The same 100 GB hosted in a full-service Relativity environment costs $15,000 over six months at $25 per GB per month — a 1,087× markup on the storage infrastructure alone. Even self-serve platforms at $5 per GB per month represent a 217× markup on the underlying commodity they are running.
This observation does not settle the question of whether the markup is justified. Platform software, document ingestion pipelines, search indexing, security infrastructure, compliance certifications, and customer support all add real cost that does not appear in the S3 bill. The question is whether the per-GB line item structure makes those costs visible, or whether it obscures them in a way that allows vendors to add further charges for services that a client reasonably assumes are already included in the hosting fee.
The single most important question to ask about any per-GB hosting fee is: what does it actually include? The answer varies substantially across market tiers, and the variation is not always apparent from the quoted rate.
At the low end of the market ($5–$10 per GB per month for self-serve platforms), hosting typically includes: data storage, a basic document viewer, search indexing, and user access to the platform. What it typically excludes: processing and ingestion (billed separately at $75–$150 per GB as a one-time charge at the start of the matter), OCR for non-text-searchable documents (billed per page or per document), near-duplicate identification (billed as an add-on or not available at all), email threading (billed separately or bundled at the next tier), and production delivery (billed per page or per outgoing GB). At this tier, the $5 hosting rate is the entry price, not the all-in price.
At the high end ($25–$40 per GB per month for full-service Relativity deployments), more of these services are bundled into the hosting rate — but processing is often still a separate charge, production can still carry a per-page fee, and the hosting rate itself is large enough that it dominates the invoice even before those additional line items appear. The bundling increases with price, but does not reach completeness at any standard market tier below the all-inclusive model.
| Platform type | Hosting rate | Processing | OCR | Near-dupe | Email threading | Production |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Self-serve ($5/GB) | $5/GB/mo | Extra ($75–150/GB) | Extra | Extra | Extra | Extra |
| Mid-market ($15/GB) | $15/GB/mo | Sometimes bundled | Sometimes bundled | Extra | Extra | $0.05–0.15/page |
| Full-service Relativity ($25–40/GB) | $25–40/GB/mo | Often extra | Often bundled | Often bundled | Often bundled | Extra |
| AI-augmented all-in ($60/GB) | $60/GB/mo | Included | Included | Included | Included | Included |
Most commercial disputes have a four-to-eight month active review window from the time a discovery request is served to the time production is substantially complete. That timeline drives a compounding hosting cost that most clients do not fully account for when evaluating vendor quotes at the start of a matter.
On a 100 GB matter at $25 per GB per month, the hosting bill runs to $15,000 over six months — before any review has been performed. At $40 per GB per month, a full-service Relativity deployment, it is $24,000 in hosting alone for the same matter over the same period. These are not one-time charges: they are monthly recurring line items that accumulate from the moment data is loaded into the platform to the moment the case closes.
The structural problem with per-GB monthly hosting is that the vendor's revenue grows with elapsed time. A matter that takes nine months instead of six generates 50% more hosting revenue than the same matter closed efficiently. Vendors operating on this model have no financial incentive to accelerate matter close, to flag when the review is substantially complete, or to help the client identify the fastest path to production. The incentive runs in precisely the wrong direction.
The all-inclusive model does not eliminate this incentive asymmetry entirely — a per-GB-per-month all-in price still accumulates over time — but it changes what the accumulation covers. When the monthly charge includes AI-powered review, privilege classification, and production delivery at no additional cost, the client's incentive and the vendor's incentive are at least pointing in the same direction: close the matter with an accurate, defensible production as quickly as possible.
The per-GB hosting fee is frequently the primary metric in vendor comparison conversations, which leads buyers to optimize for the wrong variable. A vendor quoting $8 per GB per month can still produce a larger invoice than one quoting $25 per GB per month, because the lower hosting rate is subsidized by a higher processing surcharge applied at ingestion, more aggressive per-document review fees, and production line items that are billed separately at delivery.
The arithmetic is straightforward. Take two vendors on a 100 GB matter, six months, 250,000 documents reviewed, 15,000 produced. Vendor A: $8/GB/month hosting ($4,800), $100/GB processing ($10,000), $1.50/doc first-pass review ($375,000), $0.10/page production ($7,500 on a 75,000-page production). Total: $397,300. Vendor B: $25/GB/month hosting ($15,000), processing bundled, review labor not included in platform fee but contracted separately at $1.50/doc ($375,000), production at $0.08/page ($6,000). Total: $396,000. The hosting rates differed by $10,200; the total invoices were nearly identical, because the per-document review fee dominates both.
Evaluating eDiscovery vendors on per-GB hosting rate alone is equivalent to evaluating a hotel on the room rate while ignoring resort fees, parking, and the minibar. The room rate is legible and comparable; the total cost of the stay is what actually matters. The same principle applies here with significantly more money at stake.
DecoverAI's published rate is $60 per gigabyte per month, all-in. That number includes ingestion, OCR, deduplication, near-duplicate identification, email threading, AI-powered relevance and privilege classification, Bates numbering, redaction, privilege log generation, and full production delivery. There is no separate processing fee, no per-document review charge, no privilege log line item, no production fee, and no seat fees for additional users.
The practical consequence of the all-in structure is that the math is simple and verifiable at the start of the matter. A 100 GB matter open for six months costs $36,000. That is the number you put in the budget, and it is the number that will appear on the final invoice, barring a change in data volume. The traditional vendor comparison for the same matter — $460,000 all-in, with the per-document review fee representing 84% of that total — is a number that is not knowable at the start of the matter because the document count after deduplication, the responsiveness rate, and the privilege rate are all variables that are determined by the data, not by the pricing model.
The $60/GB rate is higher than any tier of traditional hosting alone, and that comparison is intentional. The rate is not a hosting fee; it is a complete matter cost. Comparing it to a $25/GB hosting fee that excludes processing, review, and production is comparing a fixed-price restaurant meal to a menu where the protein costs $25 and the sides, sauces, and service charge are billed separately. The $60 rate is the total bill. See the pricing page for the full per-GB breakdown and the cost calculator for specific data volumes.
The single most important question to ask about any per-GB hosting quote: what does this number actually include? A vendor who cannot give you a complete list of what is bundled has reserved the right to bill the rest separately. That list — and its omissions — is where the real pricing comparison lives.