Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Object storage bills on three meters, and estimating only the first is the most common budgeting error. Storage is charged per gigabyte-month, prorated hourly, at roughly 0.018 to 0.023 dollars per GB for the standard tiers of the three hyperscalers and about a quarter of that at Backblaze B2 or Wasabi. Egress is charged per gigabyte leaving the provider network, typically 0.087 to 0.12 dollars per GB at the majors, which makes a single terabyte download cost around 90 dollars and is the mechanism behind most cloud lock-in complaints. Request charges apply per operation, on the order of 0.004 to 0.005 dollars per thousand PUT or GET calls, negligible for archival workloads but material for applications serving millions of small objects daily. Tier selection usually moves the bill more than provider selection. Standard tiers have no minimum retention; infrequent-access tiers cut storage price roughly in half but add retrieval fees and a 30-day minimum; archive tiers around 0.004 dollars per GB impose a 90-day minimum and retrieval latency measured in minutes to hours; deep archive near 0.001 dollars per GB imposes 180 days and can take up to 12 hours to restore. Delete early and you still pay the minimum. The projection here compounds a monthly growth rate, so 5 percent per month is a 1.80x multiple over twelve months, not 60 percent. Treat all rates as approximate list prices for a single common region: real invoices vary by region, include replication and versioning copies, and enterprise agreements or committed-use discounts of 30 to 50 percent are not reflected in public price sheets.

Cloud object storage as a metered utility began with Amazon S3, launched on 14 March 2006 at 0.15 dollars per gigabyte-month plus 0.20 dollars per gigabyte of data transfer, with a flat namespace of buckets and objects addressed over HTTP rather than a POSIX filesystem. That pricing shape, storage plus transfer plus requests, was copied by essentially every competitor that followed. Microsoft announced Windows Azure Storage including the Blob service in 2008, and Google Cloud Storage entered preview in 2010. Sustained competition and falling drive costs cut the headline standard-tier rate by roughly 85 percent over the following fifteen years. The tiering system arrived as providers recognized that most stored bytes are never read again. AWS introduced Glacier in 2012 for archival data with retrieval delays, added Intelligent-Tiering in 2018 to move objects automatically based on observed access, and launched Glacier Deep Archive in 2019 at roughly one tenth of a cent per gigabyte-month. Meanwhile a second tier of the market attacked egress pricing rather than storage pricing: Backblaze opened B2 in 2015 at half a cent per gigabyte, Wasabi launched with flat pricing and no egress charge, and Cloudflare announced R2 in 2021 with zero egress fees, which pushed the incumbents to broaden free-transfer allowances. Egress economics, not storage economics, has become the main axis of competition.