Cloud Storage Cost Calculator
Estimate monthly and total cloud storage bills.
Results update as you type.
How it works
A cloud storage cost calculator estimates what keeping data in a service like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob will cost, from the amount stored, the per-gigabyte monthly rate, and how many months you keep it. Cloud providers price storage per gigabyte per month, so a clear estimate helps you budget and compare tiers before committing workloads or archives to the cloud. The estimate matters because storage costs accumulate quietly. A few terabytes at a low per-gigabyte rate seems cheap monthly, but over a year across many buckets it adds up, and forgotten data keeps billing indefinitely. Seeing the monthly and total figures side by side helps you decide whether to move cold data to a cheaper archival tier, delete stale backups, or negotiate committed-use discounts. The calculation is deliberately simple: storage cost is linear, so multiply gigabytes by the per-gigabyte-month price for the monthly figure, then by the number of months for the total. Real bills also include request charges, data-transfer (egress) fees, and tier differences, which this baseline does not model, so treat the result as the storage-at-rest portion. Engineers, finance teams, and anyone forecasting cloud spend use a storage cost calculator to size budgets and spot savings before the invoice arrives.
total = gigabytes × price per GB-month × months
Cloud storage is billed per gigabyte for each month it is held, so the monthly charge is the amount stored multiplied by the per-gigabyte rate. Multiplying that monthly figure by the number of months gives the total over the period. The model works because storage pricing is linear in both size and time: doubling either the data kept or the duration doubles the corresponding part of the bill, with no fixed floor in this basic estimate.
Source:Standard cloud pricing model
We review all our tools from time to time to ensure accuracy.
Worked example
How to use this calculator
- 1
Enter your values
Enter storage used, price per gb-month and number of months.
- 2
Adjust the options
Fine-tune any options to match your situation.
- 3
Read your result
Total cost updates instantly as you type — no button to press.
Frequently asked questions
What is a GB-month in cloud pricing?
A GB-month is the standard unit cloud providers bill storage in: one gigabyte kept for one month. If you store 100 GB for a full month, you are billed for 100 GB-months. Storing the same data for half a month bills roughly 50 GB-months, since most providers prorate by the hour. This unit lets pricing scale smoothly with both how much you store and how long you keep it.
Does this include data transfer costs?
No, this calculator estimates only storage at rest, the charge for keeping data. Providers separately bill data transfer, especially egress, the cost of moving data out of the cloud to the internet or another region. Egress can rival or exceed storage costs for busy applications. There are also small per-request charges for operations. Add those separately when budgeting, as they depend heavily on your access patterns rather than volume stored.
How can I reduce my cloud storage bill?
Move infrequently accessed data to cheaper archival or cold-storage tiers, which cost a fraction of standard storage in exchange for slower or costlier retrieval. Delete stale backups, logs, and orphaned data that no longer serve a purpose. Enable lifecycle policies to transition or expire objects automatically. For predictable long-term needs, committed-use discounts lower the rate. Regularly auditing what you store is often the largest single saving.
Why do storage prices vary so much?
Prices differ by provider, region, and storage class. Standard tiers optimised for frequent access cost more per gigabyte than archival tiers meant for rarely touched data. Geographic region affects price because of local infrastructure costs. Redundancy options, such as storing copies across multiple zones, also raise the rate. Enter the specific per-gigabyte-month price for the exact tier and region you are using to get an accurate estimate.
Is cloud storage cheaper than local storage?
It depends on scale, access needs, and time horizon. Cloud storage avoids upfront hardware costs and offers durability, redundancy, and easy scaling, which suits variable or growing needs. For very large, steady, long-lived datasets, owning hardware can be cheaper over years despite the maintenance burden. This calculator helps you project the cloud side of that comparison so you can weigh it against the total cost of running your own storage.