Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

How This Cloud Storage Cost Calculator Works

This calculator estimates your monthly cloud storage bill by combining three common cost components:

• Storage used (GB) – how many gigabytes you keep stored on average during the month.
• Data retrieved (GB) – how much data you read, restore, or download from storage.
• Outbound transfer (GB) – how much data leaves your provider to the public internet or other regions.

You then enter a price per GB for each component to match your cloud provider and region. The calculator multiplies usage by the corresponding rate and sums the results to produce an estimated pre-tax monthly cost.

Cost Formulas Used in the Calculator

The calculator uses a straightforward linear pricing model. Each cost component is calculated independently and then added together:

• Storage cost = storage used (GB) × storage price per GB
• Retrieval cost = data retrieved (GB) × retrieval price per GB
• Transfer cost = outbound transfer (GB) × transfer price per GB

The total estimated monthly bill is the sum of these three pieces:

Where:

• is storage in gigabytes (GB)
• is storage price per GB
• is data retrieved in GB
• is retrieval price per GB
• is outbound transfer in GB
• is transfer price per GB

Interpreting the Results

The result shown by the calculator is an estimated monthly pre-tax cost for your cloud storage usage based on the inputs you provided.

Use the output in these ways:

• Budget planning – check whether a new project or workload will fit within your storage budget.
• Sensitivity analysis – change one input at a time to see how much each factor (storage, retrieval, transfer) contributes to the total.
• Invoice comparison – compare the estimated result with your latest bill to see which additional charges (such as request fees or taxes) are not captured here.

Remember that this is an approximation. Real invoices may differ because of free tiers, minimum charges, or additional line items that your provider applies.

Worked Example: Estimating a Simple Cloud Storage Bill

Suppose a team stores log archives and media assets in a standard object storage service. Over one month, their usage looks like this:

• Storage used: 1,000 GB (about 1 TB) on average
• Data retrieved: 50 GB of restores and reads
• Outbound transfer: 100 GB of downloads to users

They look up pricing in their region and enter these rates:

• Storage price per GB: $0.023
• Retrieval price per GB: $0.010
• Transfer price per GB: $0.090

The calculator applies the linear formulas:

• Storage cost = 1,000 × 0.023 = $23.00
• Retrieval cost = 50 × 0.010 = $0.50
• Transfer cost = 100 × 0.090 = $9.00

The estimated monthly total is:

$23.00 + $0.50 + $9.00 = $32.50 per month

If the team expects traffic to double, they can update the outbound transfer field to 200 GB and immediately see how much the transfer portion of the bill will grow while storage stays constant.

Typical Cloud Storage Price Ranges

Actual prices vary by provider, region, and storage class, and they change over time. The ranges below are only rough benchmarks to help you choose starting values for the calculator fields. Always verify current prices on your provider’s official pricing page.

Use the midpoints of these ranges as a starting point if you are still researching providers. Once you have chosen a specific platform and region, replace the defaults with exact prices from its pricing documentation.

Mapping the Fields to Real-World Use Cases

The same three inputs can describe many different workloads. Here are some common scenarios and how they map to the calculator fields:

• Backup and disaster recovery – Storage is often high, retrieval is usually low and sporadic, and outbound transfer is minimal except during tests or real incidents.
• Media delivery (video, audio, images) – Storage scales with your catalog size, but outbound transfer can dominate costs as users stream or download content.
• Analytics data lake – Large volumes of log files and event data increase storage, while retrieval depends on query frequency and the tools reading the data.
• Software downloads – Storage changes slowly, but every user download adds to outbound transfer.

For each use case, adjust the three usage inputs to match your expected patterns, then tune the price fields to match your chosen cloud provider.

Assumptions and Limitations

To keep the calculator simple and easy to understand, several assumptions are made about how pricing works. These are important when comparing the estimate to a real invoice:

• No free tiers or included quotas – The formulas assume you pay from the first gigabyte. Many providers include a small free allowance for storage or transfer that is not modeled here.
• No taxes or VAT – The result is a pre-tax estimate and does not include sales tax, VAT, or other local charges.
• No request or API call fees – Costs for PUT, GET, LIST, and other API operations are excluded, even though many object storage services charge for them.
• No minimum storage duration or early deletion fees – Archival and infrequent-access tiers may charge penalties for deleting data too early. Those are not reflected.
• Single region and storage class – The calculator assumes one storage class and one region. Multi-region replication or mixing tiers will change the real bill.
• Linear, flat per-GB pricing – Tiered discounts (for example, cheaper prices above a certain number of terabytes) are not modeled. Enter an average price per GB if your provider uses volume tiers.
• Static pricing during the month – The estimate assumes that published prices stay constant for the full billing period.

Because of these simplifications, treat the result as a guiding estimate rather than an exact prediction. For precise budgeting, cross-check the numbers with your provider’s official pricing documentation and billing calculator.