Cloud Storage Cost Estimator — Compare AWS S3, Google Cloud and Azure Pricing

Our free cloud storage cost estimator calculates and compares monthly storage costs across AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage. Factor in storage volume, data egress and API request costs to get a realistic total cost of ownership — and find out which provider is cheapest for your specific usage pattern before committing to a platform.

What Drives Cloud Storage Costs?

Cloud storage billing has three main components:

• Storage cost — charged per GB stored per month (~$0.018–0.023/GB for standard tiers)
• Egress cost — charged when data leaves the cloud region (~$0.08–0.12/GB). This is often the largest surprise cost — data going IN is free, data going OUT is charged.
• Request cost — charged per API call (GET, PUT, LIST operations). High-frequency applications with millions of small objects can accumulate significant request costs.

Cloud Storage Tiers Explained

• Standard / Hot — Frequently accessed data. Higher storage cost, lowest access cost.
• Infrequent Access / Cool — Data accessed less than once per month. Lower storage cost, higher retrieval cost.
• Archive / Cold — Long-term archival. Very low storage cost but retrieval takes hours and costs significantly more.
• Glacier / Archive — Compliance and long-term backup. Lowest storage cost, highest retrieval cost and time.

Cloud Storage Cost Optimisation Tips

• Enable lifecycle policies to automatically move data to cheaper tiers as it ages
• Use intelligent tiering (AWS S3 Intelligent-Tiering) for unpredictable access patterns
• Compress data before storage — reduces both storage and egress costs
• Deploy your compute in the same region as your storage to avoid cross-region egress charges
• Use CDN caching (CloudFront, Cloud CDN, Azure CDN) to reduce egress costs for frequently accessed objects