Methodology

What these calculators are (and are not)

• Planning models: back-of-the-napkin estimates that highlight the primary cost drivers (requests, GB transferred, GB-month stored, instance-hours, vCPU/RAM hours).
• Not official quotes: providers charge by region, tiering, free allowances, minimums, rounding, and product-specific rules. Always verify against official docs before committing spend.
• Bounded on purpose: each calculator page tells you what it includes/excludes so you can build a complete model without double-counting.

How to get a useful estimate in 10 minutes

1. Pick one workload and one environment (prod, region, tier). Mixing environments is the fastest path to nonsense.
2. Start with measurable drivers: requests/month, GB/month (egress/transfer), instance-hours, and GB-month stored.
3. Use effective rates first (blended $/GB, $/1M requests) to get directionally correct. Add tiering later if you need it.
4. Add the common multipliers: retries, fan-out (deliveries per message), and cache hit rate (origin egress vs edge bandwidth).
5. Validate with a real week of data. If directionality is wrong, fix boundaries and units before “optimizing”.

Boundaries & units: the two most common indexing-killer mistakes

Most “bad estimates” come from a unit mismatch or the wrong billing boundary (internet vs cross-region vs intra-AZ). If your site is thin, these sections are also where you can add genuine, unique help users can’t get from generic AI summaries.

• GB vs GiB: cloud billing often uses decimal GB. Many dashboards show GiB. Convert explicitly using Units converter.
• Requests units: some services price per 10k, per 100k, or per 1M. A single unit slip becomes a 10× or 100× error.
• Origin egress vs CDN bandwidth: CDN edge bandwidth is not the same as origin egress. Treat cache fill and edge delivery as separate line items. Guide: origin egress vs CDN bandwidth.

Validation workflow (what to check after changes)

1. Identify the primary driver metric for the cost: requests, GB processed, GB-month, or instance-hours.
2. Compare the estimate to the first real bill (or a representative week) and adjust the effective rate or the driver.
3. Re-check incident windows: timeouts and retries can multiply requests and bytes even when success traffic is flat.
4. Keep a baseline and a peak scenario so your budget survives traffic spikes.

Where pricing comes from

Most calculators accept your own pricing inputs because pricing varies by region and discount. If you need official sources, start with provider pricing pages and then validate in billing exports.

• AWS pricing overview: aws.amazon.com/pricing
• Azure pricing overview: azure.microsoft.com/pricing
• Google Cloud pricing overview: cloud.google.com/pricing

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Suggested starting points