Cloud & Platform

Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Storage, requests and retrieval costed across four tiers, with the minimum-duration trap made explicit.

Loading the tool…

Processing happens locally in your browser. What you paste or load is processed by this page and is not uploaded to a server. Nothing is stored unless you use a control that says it stores something, and you can clear anything this site has kept from the privacy page.

How to use this tool

  1. Set the stored volume. Sizes can be written as 500 GB, 20 TB or 20 TiB.
  2. Add the monthly read and write request counts — this is where the tier comparison usually turns around.
  3. Add how much data is actually retrieved each month if you are considering a cold tier.
  4. Select Cost the storage, then replace the default rates with your own before quoting the figure to anyone.

What cloud storage cost calculator does

For anything actively read, the bytes are the smallest part of an object storage bill. The request charges and the retrieval charges are the rest, and they move in the opposite direction to the storage price — which is why moving a heavily-queried dataset to a colder tier so reliably raises the bill instead of lowering it.

All three components are shown for all four tiers, so the trade is visible before you make it rather than after. The minimum duration is shown too: an object on a ninety-day tier is billed for ninety days even if you delete it tomorrow, which makes cold storage a poor choice for anything that gets rewritten. Every price is an input with a typical published rate as its default — put your own rates in before quoting any of it.

Frequently asked questions

Because the cheaper tiers charge far more per request and add a retrieval charge per gigabyte. At high read volumes those two overwhelm what you save on the bytes. That is the intended trade — cold storage is priced for data you keep and do not read — and the table shows all three components so you can see the crossover instead of discovering it on a bill.

An object on a ninety-day tier is billed for ninety days even if you delete it after one. So a dataset that is rewritten weekly costs the same as one kept for a quarter, and a lifecycle rule that moves objects to archive and deletes them a month later can cost several times more than leaving them on standard. Cold tiers suit data that is written once and left alone.

They are typical published rates, close to each other across the three providers, and they are defaults you are meant to replace. Real prices vary by region, change over time, and are usually discounted under a commitment — so treat the numbers as the shape of the answer and put your own rates in before quoting anything.

Because analytics workloads generate far more requests than people expect. A query engine reading a partitioned dataset issues a request per file, so a table split into a million small files costs a million requests per full scan — which is both the storage bill and the reason the query is slow. If the request column dominates here, the fix is usually file layout rather than storage class.