Cloud Storage Cost Estimator
Inputs
| Stored data | 1,000 |
|---|---|
| Storage price per GB/mo | 0.02 $ |
| Monthly egress | 100 |
| Egress price per GB | 0.09 $ |
| Monthly requests | 0 |
| Price per 1,000 requests | 0 $ |
Cloud Storage Cost Estimator
Estimate monthly and annual cloud storage costs from data volume, outbound transfer (egress), and API requests. Enter per-GB rates from any cloud provider.
Inputs
Storage
Egress
Requests
Results
Enter a value to see results.
Estimated Cost
Cloud Storage Cost
Cloud storage billing has three components: the charge for data at rest, the charge for data leaving the service (egress), and the charge for API operations (requests). Understanding each component helps control costs as storage volumes grow.
Storage charge
The storage charge is the simplest component. Providers measure the average size of the bucket or container over the billing period and multiply by a per-gigabyte monthly rate. AWS S3 Standard starts at $0.023/GB/mo; Google Cloud Storage Standard at $0.020/GB/mo; Azure Blob Storage hot tier at $0.018/GB/mo. Rates vary by region and tier.
If the bucket holds 1 TB (1,024 GB) for a full calendar month at $0.023/GB/mo, the storage charge is roughly
1,000 GB×$0.023/GB/mo=$23.00/mo(using 1,000 GB here for round numbers; billing typically uses SI gigabytes.)
Egress charge
Egress — outbound data transfer to the internet or to another region — is usually the largest variable cost. Providers do not charge for ingress (uploading) and typically do not charge for transfer within the same region to co-located compute, but internet-bound or cross-region egress is billed per gigabyte.
Rates commonly tier: the first 100 GB/month may be free, followed by a rate around $0.09/GB up to 10 TB, declining above that. Serving 100 GB per month at $0.09/GB adds $9.00 to the monthly bill.
Using a content delivery network (CDN) in front of object storage can reduce origin egress substantially: the CDN caches objects and absorbs most requests, so the origin pulls only uncached or low-popularity content.
Request charge
Each API call — PUT, GET, DELETE, LIST — carries a small per-operation charge. AWS S3 charges $0.005 per 1,000 PUT/COPY/POST/LIST requests and $0.0004 per 1,000 GET/SELECT requests. For most applications request charges are negligible compared with storage and egress. High-frequency polling patterns or very large object listings can make them visible in the bill.
Worked example
An application stores 2 TB of user files, serves 500 GB of downloads per month, and performs 5 million GET requests.
- Storage: 2{,}000 \text{ GB} \times \0.023 = $46.00$
- Egress: 500 \text{ GB} \times \0.09 = $45.00$
- Requests: \frac{5{,}000{,}000}{1{,}000} \times \0.0004 = 5{,}000 \times $0.0004 = $2.00$
Over a year: 93.00 \times 12 = \1{,}116$.
Reducing costs
Infrequent-access and archive storage tiers charge less per GB but more per request and impose minimum storage durations (30–180 days). They are cost-effective for backups, compliance archives, and data that is read infrequently.
Lifecycle rules automatically transition objects to cheaper tiers or delete them after a set period. Configuring lifecycle policies to move objects older than 90 days to an infrequent-access class often cuts storage costs by 40–60% for workloads with long-tail access patterns.
Multi-part uploads and transfer acceleration can reduce effective ingress costs for large objects by improving throughput without increasing the per-GB charge.
What this calculator does not model
This calculator uses a single per-GB rate for each component. Actual bills include tiered pricing bands (costs per GB decrease at higher volumes), per-class minimum duration charges, replication costs, early-deletion fees for archive tiers, and provider-specific line items. Use the result as a first-order estimate and validate against the provider's pricing page or built-in cost calculator.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why does egress typically cost more than storage?
Cloud providers invest heavily in their private backbone networks and charge a premium for data leaving those networks to the public internet. Storage capacity, by contrast, is a commodity that has declined in cost steadily. A single multi-terabyte download can exceed months of storage charges, which is why cloud architects minimize cross-region and internet-bound traffic through caching, content delivery networks, and same-region data co-location.
Egress within the same region is usually free or very cheap. Egress between regions is cheaper than egress to the internet. The first 100 GB/month to the internet is free on several major platforms, with tiered rates above that threshold.
Does this match AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob pricing exactly?
No. This calculator uses provider-agnostic inputs intended as a planning tool — not an exact invoice predictor. Actual bills differ because of tiered pricing (per-GB rates decrease above certain thresholds), free-tier allowances, reserved-capacity discounts, regional variation, minimum storage duration charges for infrequent-access classes, and additional line items such as replication, encryption key management, or lifecycle transition operations.
Always verify current rates on the provider's pricing page and export a cost estimate from the provider's own pricing calculator before making budgeting commitments.
Disclaimer
This is a planning estimate based on the pricing inputs you enter. It does not account for tiered discounts, free-tier allowances, minimum storage duration, replication, or other provider-specific charges. Verify current rates directly with your cloud provider before making financial commitments.