FinOps calculators
Estimate core managed-service line items and compare pricing options with explicit assumptions.
A practical estimate
- Start with effective rates and real drivers (requests, GB, hours) before optimizing pricing tiers.
- Keep baseline and peak scenarios so budgets survive incidents.
- Separate “compute-only” comparisons from full-stack costs (logs, transfer, storage, retries).
Common pitfalls
- Unit errors (per 10k vs per 1M, GB vs GiB) causing 10× mistakes.
- Retry storms and fan-out multiplying request volume.
- Ignoring storage growth and retention in “compute-only” models.
How to get your inputs
- Requests: service metrics or API gateway dashboards (RPS and totals).
- Transfer: billing exports grouped by usage type (GB by boundary).
- Compute: instance-hours from billing data and uptime schedules.
- Storage: average GB-month and request counts from storage metrics.
21 FinOps tools
AWS SNS Cost Calculator
Estimate messaging cost from publish volume, delivery volume, and optional payload transfer.
SNS Delivery Volume Estimator
Estimate SNS delivery volume from publishes, fan-out, and retry multipliers.
AWS SES Cost Calculator
Estimate email sending cost from volume and optional payload transfer assumptions.
AWS KMS Cost Calculator
Estimate KMS costs from key-months and request volume.
KMS Request Volume Estimator
Estimate KMS request volume from workload units and call rates.
AWS SSM Parameter Store Cost Calculator
Estimate Parameter Store costs from advanced parameter count and API call volume.
AWS Secrets Manager Cost Calculator
Estimate Secrets Manager costs from secret-months and API call volume.
AWS Fargate Cost Calculator
Estimate Fargate-style compute cost from vCPU-hours and memory GB-hours.
AWS Lambda vs Fargate Cost Calculator
Compare Lambda vs Fargate compute costs side-by-side from your inputs.
AWS Fargate vs EC2 Cost Calculator
Compare Fargate vCPU/GB-hours vs EC2 instance-hours from your inputs.
ECS on EC2 vs ECS on Fargate Cost Calculator
Compare ECS on EC2 vs ECS on Fargate compute costs from your inputs.
ECS Task Sizing Calculator
Estimate required ECS task count from vCPU/memory demand and per-task sizing.
Reserved vs On-demand Break-even Calculator
Find the utilization point where a commitment beats on-demand pricing.
Compute Instance Cost Calculator
Estimate monthly compute cost from instance count, $/hour, and expected uptime.
AWS Lambda Cost Calculator
Estimate Lambda-style request + GB-seconds compute cost from your inputs.
AWS RDS Cost Calculator
Estimate RDS-style cost from instance hours, storage, backups, and I/O assumptions.
AWS DynamoDB Cost Calculator
Estimate DynamoDB-style read/write request + storage costs from your inputs.
AWS EBS Cost Calculator
Estimate EBS-style storage + optional IOPS/throughput costs from your inputs.
AWS SQS Cost Calculator
Estimate SQS-style request cost from messages and requests per message.
SQS Request Volume Estimator
Estimate SQS request volume from messages, retries, and extra API calls.
RPS to Monthly Requests Calculator
Estimate monthly request volume from RPS, hours/day, and utilization.
Result interpretation (FinOps)
- Use a baseline and a peak case so budgets survive load spikes and incidents.
- Keep compute-only comparisons separate from full-stack costs (logs, storage, transfer).
- Break-even results are sensitive to uptime hours and utilization, not just list prices.
- Apply discounts or commitments after the driver model is stable and validated.
- Track assumptions explicitly so revisions are fast when pricing or usage changes.
Scenario planning (FinOps)
- Baseline: average utilization, standard uptime hours, normal retry rates.
- Peak: 2x-3x traffic, higher transfer, and more log ingestion.
- Commitments: compare best-case utilization vs realistic utilization.
- Growth: add monthly growth assumptions for storage and request volume.
- Risk: keep a contingency buffer for incident months.
Validate after changes (FinOps)
- Compare modeled drivers to billing exports by usage type.
- Verify that commitment assumptions match actual utilization.
- Track top 3 line items weekly to confirm the model stays aligned.
- Adjust inputs when architecture or retention policies change.
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