Compare
LakehouseBox and Cloudflare Basin Catalog (R2 Data Catalog)
Cloudflare's Iceberg catalog on R2, called R2 Data Catalog until its general availability on 1 October 2026, is now Basin Catalog. Both are managed Iceberg REST catalogs over their own storage.
Side by side
Their column is what their own pages said on 12 October 2026 (sources below); prices are theirs, in their currency, before tax.
| Cloudflare Basin Catalog | LakehouseBox | |
|---|---|---|
| Who operates it, where | Cloudflare (a US company). R2 buckets can be pinned to an EU jurisdiction; jurisdiction support for the catalog is listed as upcoming | Lakehousebox, S.L. (Spain, in formation); tables and files stored at Hetzner in Nuremberg, Germany; a locked backup copy in France |
| To start | A Cloudflare account with an R2 subscription and a payment card on file | An agent needs no account: lhbox new gives it a catalog it can write for 72 hours, until a person claims it. A person: a free account, 5 GB, no card |
| Price | R2: $0.015 per GB-month, $4.50 per million writes, $0.36 per million reads, no egress fees, 10 GB free. Catalog: 1 million operations a month included, then $9 per million; compaction beyond 10 GB, $0.005 per GB | Free up to 5 GB. Only storage is metered: no request, egress or compute fees. Paid storage is not open yet (announced at €0.10 per GB-month) |
| Catalog and credentials | Iceberg REST catalog; a Cloudflare API token with admin read-write or read-only on R2 and the catalog; finer namespace and table permissions on the roadmap | Iceberg REST catalog; each engine gets storage credentials for one table at a time, valid for an hour |
| Engines | DuckDB 1.4.0+ attaches and writes; Spark, PyIceberg and others | DuckDB 1.5.5+, PyIceberg 0.12, Spark 3.5 (status per engine) |
| Iceberg v3 | On the roadmap | Yes: DuckDB 1.5.5 writes format-version 3, geometry columns included |
| Maintenance | Compaction (billed above the included amount) and free snapshot expiry | Compaction, snapshot expiry and orphan-file cleanup every 6 hours, included |
| Compute | Yours, or Basin SQL at $2.50 per TB scanned | Yours: your agent or laptop runs the engine. Server-side read-only SQL (20 s per query) through the API and MCP |
| SLA | Cloudflare's terms | None yet; one site, no standby |
Which one
Choose Cloudflare Basin Catalog when reads should be free of egress fees at global scale, you want Cloudflare's ingest pipelines and serverless SQL next to the data, and you are already on Cloudflare.
Choose LakehouseBox when you want Iceberg v3 (geometry included) today; credentials scoped to one table rather than an account-wide token; an agent that starts without an account or a card; or a European operator.
Start with LakehouseBox: let your agent start without an account, or sign up free. Other comparisons: all of them.
Sources
Checked 12 October 2026. Something out of date? Write to hello@lakehousebox.com and we correct it.
- Cloudflare Basin announcement
- R2 pricing
- Basin Catalog pricing
- Basin Catalog: getting started
- Basin Catalog with DuckDB
- R2 data location
Ours: pricing, sovereignty, engines, capabilities.