Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

How this is calculated

⚠️ THE STORAGE PRICE IS RARELY THE WHOLE BILL, AND ON SOME ACCOUNTS IT IS NOT EVEN THE LARGEST PART. Three other charges do most of the damage: EGRESS, which is what you pay to move data out of the provider's network; RETRIEVAL, which cold and archive tiers charge to make data readable again; and per-request API fees, which are trivial per operation and can be significant at volume. A comparison that only weighs the per-terabyte storage rate will pick the wrong tier more often than not. EGRESS IS USUALLY THE ONE PEOPLE HAVE NOT COUNTED. On the illustrative rates here, moving one terabyte out costs about what storing that terabyte for FOUR MONTHS costs. That ratio is the thing to internalise: if your data leaves regularly, the bill is driven by movement rather than by volume, and choosing a tier on its storage rate is close to irrelevant. ⚠️ COLD TIERS TRADE STORAGE COST FOR RETRIEVAL COST, AND THERE IS A CROSSOVER. Archive storage can be five or six times cheaper to hold, while charging a substantial fee every time you read it back. That is an excellent trade for a backup nobody touches and a terrible one for anything actively used. The break-even output is the honest way to decide: it is your stored volume multiplied by the difference in storage rates, divided by the retrieval rate, and it tells you the monthly download at which the two tiers cost exactly the same. ⚠️ THE PRICES HERE ARE ILLUSTRATIVE AND WILL BE WRONG FOR YOU. Cloud pricing changes, varies by region, and differs between providers - so every rate is an input rather than a built-in figure. Replace all four with your provider's current published numbers before trusting any output. A calculator that shipped with one vendor's prices baked in would be stale within months and confidently wrong. MINIMUM STORAGE DURATIONS ARE NOT MODELLED AND THEY CATCH PEOPLE OUT. Most cold tiers bill a minimum commitment - commonly 30, 90 or 180 days - so deleting something after a week can still cost the full minimum. For data that turns over quickly, a cold tier can be more expensive than a standard one even before retrieval is counted. RETRIEVAL SPEED IS A SEPARATE AXIS FROM PRICE. Archive tiers often offer expedited, standard and bulk retrieval at very different rates, with restore times from minutes to many hours. A cheap retrieval rate that takes twelve hours is not usable in an outage, which is a restore-time question rather than a cost one. EGRESS BETWEEN REGIONS AND BETWEEN SERVICES ALSO COUNTS. Data moving out to the internet is the obvious case, but cross-region replication and traffic to another provider are commonly charged too. Only movement within the same region is usually free.

Common questions

Why is my cloud bill higher than the storage price suggested?

Almost always egress - what you pay for data leaving the provider's network - and it is the charge people most often fail to budget for. On the illustrative rates here, moving one terabyte out costs about what storing that same terabyte for four months costs. If your data is read back regularly, the bill is driven by movement rather than by volume, and the per-terabyte storage rate you compared providers on turns out to be close to irrelevant. Retrieval fees on cold tiers and per-request API charges make up most of the rest.

When is an archive tier actually cheaper?

When you rarely read the data, and the break-even output tells you exactly where that stops being true. It is your stored volume multiplied by the difference in storage rates, divided by the retrieval rate - which on the defaults works out at 4.75 TB of downloads a month for 5 TB stored. Below that, archive wins; above it, the retrieval fees have overtaken the storage saving and standard is cheaper. That is why archive is excellent for a backup nobody touches and poor for anything actively used.

Are these prices accurate?

No, and they are not meant to be - every rate is an input precisely because cloud pricing changes, varies by region and differs between providers. Replace all four with your provider's current published figures before trusting any output. A calculator that shipped with one vendor's prices baked in would be stale within months and confidently wrong, which is worse than being obviously generic. What the tool contributes is the SHAPE of the comparison; the numbers have to be yours.

What is a minimum storage duration?

A commitment most cold tiers apply - commonly 30, 90 or 180 days - where you are billed for that period whether or not you keep the data that long. Delete an archived file after a week and you can still pay the full ninety days. It is not modelled here, and it has a counter-intuitive consequence worth knowing: for data that turns over quickly, a cold tier can work out MORE expensive than a standard one before retrieval is even counted. Check the minimum duration before moving anything short-lived into archive.

Does retrieval speed cost extra?

Usually yes, and it is a separate axis from the storage price. Archive tiers commonly offer expedited, standard and bulk retrieval at substantially different rates, with restore times ranging from a few minutes to many hours. That makes the cheapest retrieval option unusable in some situations regardless of price - a twelve-hour bulk restore is fine for a compliance request and useless during an outage. Decide what restore time you actually need first, then compare the price of that tier rather than the headline one.

Does data moving between regions count as egress?

Commonly, yes. The obvious case is data going out to the internet, but cross-region replication and traffic to another cloud provider are usually charged too - it is generally only movement within the same region that is free. This catches people building multi-region redundancy, where the replication traffic itself becomes a recurring line item nobody costed. If you are planning that kind of architecture, work out the monthly replication volume and treat it as egress in this tool.

What about the per-request charges?

They are trivial individually and can matter at volume, which makes them easy to dismiss and occasionally expensive. Providers charge per API operation, and cold tiers often charge more per request than standard ones. A workload writing millions of small objects can spend more on requests than on the bytes themselves - so if your data is many tiny files rather than a few large ones, the request line is worth checking separately. This tool does not model it, because the rate depends on operation type in a way that varies too much between providers to generalise.

Take it further with AI

Copy this into ChatGPT or Claude with your own numbers filled in. It hands over the figures this calculator worked out, so the answer is built on real arithmetic instead of a guess.

I used the Cloud Storage Cost Calculator at https://www.bfcbrilliance.com/tools/cloud-storage-cost-calculator.

What I entered:
- Data you store (TB): ___
- Data you pull back out a month (TB): ___
- Standard tier - storage ($/TB/month): ___
- Archive tier - storage ($/TB/month): ___
- Archive tier - retrieval fee ($/TB): ___
- Egress - data leaving the provider ($/TB): ___

What it calculated:
- What the archive tier saves a month: ___
- Standard tier, all in: ___
- Archive tier, all in: ___
- Monthly download where the tiers cost the same: ___
- Egress alone: ___

Use those figures as given — they are already worked out, so please don't recalculate or estimate your own. Help me turn them into a plan: what to buy or do, in what order, roughly what it should cost, and the mistakes people most often make with this job.

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