Cloud Storage Cost Estimator

Compares monthly storage costs across AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage and Azure Blob Storage, factoring in storage volume, egress and API request costs — the actual total, not just the headline per-GB storage price that most cost comparisons stop at.

Three line items, and one of them is a trap

• Storage — billed per GB per month, typically $0.018–0.023/GB for standard tiers
• Egress — billed when data leaves the region, typically $0.08–0.12/GB. Data going in is free everywhere. Data coming out is where the actual bill lives, and it's the cost most people underestimate when they're only looking at the storage price on the pricing page.
• Requests — billed per API call (GET/PUT/LIST). Applications doing millions of small object operations can rack up meaningful request costs that never show up if you're only modelling total data volume.

Tiers, and matching them to actual access patterns

• Standard / Hot — frequently accessed, higher storage cost, cheapest to retrieve
• Infrequent Access / Cool — for data touched less than monthly, lower storage cost, more expensive to pull
• Archive / Cold — very cheap to hold, retrieval can take hours and costs meaningfully more
• Glacier-tier archival — the cheapest storage available, and the slowest, most expensive to retrieve — right for compliance and long-term backup, wrong for anything you might need in a hurry

The optimisations that actually move the bill

• Lifecycle policies that automatically age data down to cheaper tiers on a schedule instead of relying on someone remembering to do it manually
• Intelligent tiering when access patterns are genuinely unpredictable, rather than guessing
• Compressing data before it's stored — cuts both the storage cost and the egress cost of every future download
• Keeping compute in the same region as the storage it reads, specifically to dodge cross-region egress charges that add up fast at scale
• CDN caching in front of frequently-accessed objects — every cache hit is egress you don't pay the origin bucket for