& Storage Estimator
How Cloud Infrastructure Costs Are Calculated
Enterprise cloud pricing is determined by four primary cost pillars: compute (virtual machine instances), storage (block, object, and archive tiers), networking (data egress, CDN, and load balancers), and managed services (databases, Kubernetes, security, and monitoring).
This estimator applies the published list-price rates from AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform for each selected region, then applies your chosen pricing model (on-demand, reserved, or spot) and operating system licensing multipliers. Regional pricing multipliers reflect the cost differential between lower-cost regions like US East and premium regions like the Middle East, Africa, and South America.
Understanding the 4 Cloud Cost Categories
Compute costs are driven by instance type, count, hours of usage, and pricing commitment level. A single m5.xlarge instance (4 vCPU / 16 GB) running 730 hours/month on-demand costs approximately $192/month in US East. The same instance on a 3-year Reserved plan costs just $86/month โ a 55% reduction. For workloads requiring many identical instances, Savings Plans or Reserved Instances deliver the highest ROI.
Storage costs vary dramatically by tier. Hot NVMe SSD block storage (used for active databases and OS disks) costs approximately $115โ230 per TB per month. Standard HDD block storage costs $20โ40/TB/month. Cold archive storage (S3 Glacier, Azure Archive, GCS Archive) costs as little as $1โ4/TB/month but carries retrieval fees of $0.01โ0.10/GB.
Networking costs are one of the most commonly underestimated line items. Data egress from cloud to the public internet is typically priced at $0.08โ0.09/GB for the first 10TB per month, dropping at volume. A deployment pushing 50TB of data to users monthly faces egress costs of approximately $4,000โ4,500/month without CDN optimization.
Managed services โ including RDS databases, Kubernetes control planes, WAF, monitoring, and key management โ add 20โ40% on top of raw compute and storage costs in typical enterprise deployments.
Regional Pricing Differences Explained
Cloud providers charge different prices depending on the data center region. US East (N. Virginia for AWS, East US for Azure, us-central1 for GCP) serves as the baseline region with the lowest list prices. Regional premiums above that baseline are caused by higher local electricity costs, data center construction and land costs, lower economies of scale in newer regions, and local regulatory compliance requirements.
Middle Eastern regions (Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia) typically carry a 18โ22% premium above US East baseline. African regions (Cape Town, Johannesburg) carry a 20โ23% premium. South American regions (Sรฃo Paulo, Santiago) carry a 22โ26% premium. Asia-Pacific regions vary widely โ Singapore and Mumbai are close to baseline, while Tokyo and Osaka carry 15โ17% premiums due to Japan's high energy costs.