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Cloud Cost Calculator

Estimate and compare monthly cloud costs across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Add compute, storage, database, load balancer, and data transfer resources to see a full breakdown.

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Add compute instances, storage, databases, load balancers, or data transfer resources above to compare costs across AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Why do cloud bills surprise so many teams?

Cloud pricing is pay-as-you-go, but almost nothing is free to forget. Instances left running over a weekend, unattached EBS volumes, old snapshots, idle NAT gateways, and cross-AZ traffic all bill silently. The classic failure mode is provisioning first and estimating never — by the time finance asks questions, the architecture is locked in. Estimating before you build, even roughly, is the cheapest cost optimization you will ever do.

How does this calculator work?

Add the building blocks of your stack — compute instances by size and hours per month, SSD/HDD/object storage by the GB, managed MySQL or PostgreSQL databases, load balancers, and outbound data transfer. The tool prices the same resource list against AWS, GCP, and Azure simultaneously, shows an itemized breakdown per provider with monthly and yearly totals, and highlights the cheapest option for your specific mix. Everything runs in your browser.

How do I estimate EC2 costs?

Start with instance size and runtime. A t3.medium running 24/7 uses about 730 hours per month; a dev box shut down nights and weekends uses closer to 250, cutting on-demand compute cost by two thirds. This calculator models that directly via the hours-per-month field. Then add what the instance drags along: an EBS root volume (gp3 at roughly $0.08/GB-month), snapshots, and an Elastic IP that bills when unattached.

What hidden costs do estimates usually miss?

Egress is the big one — AWS charges around $0.09 per GB out to the internet, so shipping 1 TB a month adds roughly $90 that never appears in instance pricing. Others: load balancers bill a base hourly rate plus usage (LCUs on AWS) even with zero traffic, managed databases cost far more than the equivalent raw VM, and storage you provisioned but never filled still bills at full size.

How do AWS, GCP, and Azure pricing differ?

The same workload rarely costs the same everywhere. GCP's e2 shared-core instances and small Cloud SQL tiers tend to undercut AWS for light workloads, while its SSD persistent disks and egress run pricier. Azure's burstable B-series is competitive at the low end but its Premium database tiers jump sharply. That is why this tool prices the whole resource list per provider — totals can flip depending on whether your stack is compute-heavy, storage-heavy, or transfer-heavy.

Are these prices exact?

No — they are representative on-demand list prices for ballpark comparison, similar to a typical US region. Real bills vary by region, sustained-use and committed-use discounts (GCP), reserved instances and Savings Plans (AWS), spot pricing, and free tiers. Use this tool to compare architectures and providers quickly, then confirm final numbers in the official AWS Pricing Calculator, Google Cloud pricing calculator, or Azure pricing calculator before committing.

How do I track real cloud costs from the command line?

Once you are running, query actuals instead of estimates: aws ce get-cost-and-usage pulls Cost Explorer data, gcloud billing accounts list pairs with BigQuery billing export on GCP, and az consumption usage list covers Azure. For infrastructure-as-code shops, infracost breakdown --path . prices a Terraform plan before you apply it — the same estimate-first workflow this calculator gives you, wired into CI.