🗄️ Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Estimate monthly cloud object storage costs across AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, and Cloudflare R2 tiers, including egress fees. Compare Standard, Infrequent Access, and Archive tiers side by side to find your cheapest option.

🗄️ Storage Details
Cold/Archive tiers have retrieval delays and fees not modeled here — best for rarely accessed data.
Data transferred out to the internet each month. Leave at 0 for storage-only cost.
📈 Cost Estimate
Total Monthly Cost
Storage Cost / Month
Egress Cost / Month
Annual Cost
Data Stored (GB)
Cost per GB Stored
Cheapest Option (same size/egress)
Total Monthly Cost by Provider/Tier
⚠️ Prices are 2026 estimates for per-GB storage and standard internet egress after typical free tiers — verify current rates on each provider's pricing page. Excludes API request charges, minimum storage duration fees, and early-deletion penalties on cold/archive tiers.
📊

Enter your details and click Calculate to see results

Guide

About the Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Last updated: August 2026 · Reviewed by the NeftCal editorial team

Cloud object storage bills are made up of two very different components: a per-GB-per-month storage fee, and a per-GB egress (data transfer out) fee charged whenever that data leaves the cloud to the internet. This cloud storage cost calculator lets you enter a data size and monthly egress volume, pick a provider and storage tier from 12 options across AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, and Cloudflare R2, and see the full monthly and annual cost — plus how every other tier and provider would price the exact same workload.

What This Calculator Estimates

It multiplies your data size by the selected tier's per-GB storage rate to get storage cost, multiplies your monthly egress by the provider's per-GB egress rate to get egress cost, sums the two for total monthly cost, and projects an annual figure — then recomputes the same size and egress volume against all 12 tiers to surface the cheapest option for your specific usage pattern.

Who Should Use This Calculator

Backend engineers choosing an object storage provider, DevOps teams migrating between clouds, media/content platforms budgeting asset hosting, and startups deciding whether Cloudflare R2's zero-egress model beats a hyperscaler for their traffic pattern all need this storage-plus-egress math before committing to a provider.

Why Storage Tier Selection Matters

The cheapest storage tier on paper isn't always the cheapest overall — a deep archive tier priced at a fraction of a cent per GB can still cost more in total than a "Hot" tier if your workload has significant egress, because egress fees on hyperscalers (AWS ~$0.09/GB, Azure ~$0.087/GB, GCP ~$0.12/GB) often dwarf the storage fee itself for data-heavy applications. Cloudflare R2's zero-egress model can be dramatically cheaper for read-heavy, internet-facing workloads even though its per-GB storage rate is higher than S3 Standard. Modeling storage and egress together, rather than storage in isolation, is essential to picking the right tier.

Real-World Applications

  • Comparing AWS S3, GCS, Azure Blob, and Cloudflare R2 for a specific data size and access pattern
  • Deciding between Hot and Archive tiers for backup and compliance data
  • Budgeting a media/asset hosting platform's monthly storage bill
  • Evaluating whether R2's zero-egress model beats a hyperscaler for a read-heavy app
  • Pairing with the Data Transfer Cost Calculator for a broader egress-focused view

Tips for Accurate Results

  • If your application serves files directly to end users (images, videos, downloads), egress cost often matters more than storage cost — pay close attention to the egress-heavy comparison in the bar chart
  • Cold and archive tiers (Glacier Deep Archive, GCS Archive, Azure Archive) have retrieval delays measured in minutes to hours and per-GB retrieval fees not modeled here — only use them for data you rarely need quickly
  • Most providers offer a small free egress tier (often 100GB/month or less) — this calculator assumes you've already exceeded any free tier
  • Re-run this calculator whenever your data footprint changes significantly, since storage costs scale linearly with data size while egress can spike unpredictably with traffic
  • For a focused view of just data-transfer pricing across more providers, see the Data Transfer Cost Calculator
Formula

The Cloud Storage Cost Formula, Explained

How this calculator turns data size, tier, and egress into a monthly bill

Cost Formulas
Data (GB) = TB entered × 1,024 (if unit is TB)

Storage Cost = Data (GB) × Tier's Per-GB Storage Rate

Egress Cost = Monthly Egress (GB) × Provider's Per-GB Egress Rate

Total Monthly Cost = Storage Cost + Egress Cost  |  Annual Cost = Total Monthly Cost × 12

The calculator uses the binary conversion of 1 TB = 1,024 GB, matching how AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure meter object storage internally — not the decimal 1,000 GB some consumer marketing uses.

🔥

Hot / Standard Tiers

Designed for frequently accessed data with instant retrieval and no minimum storage duration. Highest per-GB price, but no retrieval fees or delays.

🧊

Cool / Nearline / Archive Tiers

Lower per-GB storage cost in exchange for retrieval fees, minimum storage durations (often 30-180 days), and for archive tiers, retrieval delays of minutes to hours.

📤

Egress Fees

Most providers charge to move data out to the internet, but not to store it or move it in. Cloudflare R2 uniquely charges zero egress.

⚙️ Why This Formula Works

Object storage bills are inherently linear in two independent dimensions — how much you store and how much you move out — so modeling them as two separate per-GB multiplications, then summing, mirrors exactly how providers itemize their invoices.

🎯 When to Use It

  • Before choosing a storage tier for a new application
  • When comparing providers for a read-heavy, egress-intensive workload
  • When deciding whether archiving old data would meaningfully cut costs

📋 Assumptions

  • A single, static tier selection for the full data size (no lifecycle transitions)
  • Data size and monthly egress stay roughly constant
  • Pricing reflects each provider's standard list rate after typical free-tier allowances

⚠️ Limitations of the Formula

  • Excludes API request (PUT/GET/LIST) charges
  • Doesn't model minimum storage duration or early-deletion penalties on cold tiers
  • Doesn't model storage-class lifecycle transitions over time
  • Doesn't include archive-tier retrieval fees or delay costs
Walkthrough

Step-by-Step: How to Use the Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

From entering your data size to comparing all 12 tiers

Enter your data size

Type the total amount of object storage data you need to store, such as 1, 50, or 500.

Choose GB or TB

Select the unit that matches your data size entry — the calculator converts TB to GB internally at 1,024 GB per TB before running the math.

Select a provider and storage tier

Pick from 12 tiers across AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, and Cloudflare R2 — each option shows its per-GB monthly storage rate directly in the dropdown.

Enter expected monthly egress

Enter how much data (in GB) you expect to transfer out to the internet each month; leave it at 0 for a storage-only estimate.

Click Calculate Storage Cost

The calculator multiplies data size by the tier's storage rate and egress volume by the provider's egress rate, then sums them into a total monthly and annual cost.

Compare against the cheapest option and chart

Review the auto-detected cheapest tier for your exact size and egress volume, and scan the bar chart ranking every tier from cheapest to most expensive at your usage level.

Example

Worked Example

Using the calculator's own default scenario — 1 TB on AWS S3 Standard, 0 GB egress

Scenario

Suppose you store 1 TB of data on AWS S3 Standard ($0.023/GB/mo) with no monthly egress.

Data Size1 TB
TierAWS S3 Standard
Monthly Egress0 GB
Step 1 — Convert TB to GB: 1 × 1,024 = 1,024 GB.
Step 2 — Storage cost: 1,024 × $0.023 = $23.55/month.
Step 3 — Egress cost: 0 × $0.09 = $0.00.
Step 4 — Total monthly cost: $23.55 + $0.00 = $23.55.
Step 5 — Annual cost: $23.55 × 12 = $282.62.
Step 6 — Now add 500GB monthly egress: AWS S3 Standard total becomes $23.55 + (500 × $0.09) = $68.55/month, while Cloudflare R2 at the same 1TB/500GB egress totals only $15.36/month — R2's zero egress fee overtakes its slightly higher storage rate once real download volume enters the picture.
Monthly Cost (storage only)
$23.55
Annual Cost
$282.62
With 500GB Egress (R2)
$15.36

Explanation: At zero egress, AWS S3 Standard's $23.55/month is a straightforward storage-only cost. But add 500GB of monthly egress — realistic for a media or download-heavy app — and AWS jumps to $68.55/month while Cloudflare R2 drops to $15.36/month, more than 4x cheaper, purely because of R2's zero-egress pricing model.

Interpretation

Understanding Your Cloud Storage Cost Result

What your projected monthly bill generally implies

Egress Share of Total CostWhat It Generally MeansRecommended Next Step
0% (no egress)Pure backup/archive workloadOptimize purely on per-GB storage rate; consider archive tiers
Under 25%Mostly storage-driven costStorage tier choice matters most; egress is a minor factor
25% – 60%Balanced storage/egress workloadCompare both dimensions carefully across providers
Over 60%Egress-dominated, read-heavy workloadStrongly consider Cloudflare R2 or a CDN in front of storage

If egress dominates your total cost: a zero-egress provider like Cloudflare R2, or fronting your existing storage with a CDN, can meaningfully cut your bill even if the per-GB storage rate is slightly higher.

If storage dominates and access is rare: check whether an archive or cold tier fits your access pattern — the savings can be an order of magnitude, at the cost of retrieval delay.

These are list-price estimates excluding API requests and minimum-duration penalties. Always confirm against your provider's live pricing page before finalizing a budget.

ℹ️

This calculator provides planning estimates only. Actual charges depend on your provider's live pricing, region, request volume, and any negotiated enterprise rate on your account.

Use Cases

Practical Use Cases for the Cloud Storage Cost Calculator

Where comparing storage tiers and egress up front genuinely helps

💾

Backup and archival storage

Compare archive tier pricing for compliance records and disaster-recovery copies.

🎞️

Media asset hosting

Budget storage and egress for a video or image-heavy application serving users directly.

📝

Log retention

Estimate the cost of retaining application logs at different storage tiers over time.

🌊

Data lake storage

Project the storage-only cost of a large analytical data lake with infrequent access.

⚖️

Comparing S3 vs GCS vs Azure Blob

Run the same data size and egress volume across all three hyperscalers side by side.

🚀

Evaluating Cloudflare R2 migration

Quantify the exact savings of moving an egress-heavy workload to a zero-egress provider.

🏢

Multi-cloud storage strategy

Split hot data and cold backups across whichever providers are cheapest for each tier.

📱

Mobile app backend storage

Budget user-generated content storage and download egress for a mobile app.

🔬

Research dataset hosting

Estimate the cost of hosting a large public or private research dataset.

🛡️

Compliance data retention planning

Model long-term archive costs for regulatory retention requirements.

📊

Startup infrastructure budgeting

Fold projected storage and egress costs into a startup's monthly burn-rate model.

🔁

Re-checking cost after growth

Re-run the numbers as data volume and traffic grow to catch tier-switch opportunities.

Pros & Cons

Benefits and Limitations

What this cloud storage cost calculator does well, and where it can't replace a live quote

✅ Benefits

  • Free, instant, and requires no signup or account
  • Covers 12 tiers across 4 major providers in one place
  • Models storage and egress cost together, not in isolation
  • Automatically finds and highlights the cheapest tier for your exact usage
  • Side-by-side comparison chart across every tier
  • Handles both GB and TB input with correct binary conversion
  • Covers both hyperscalers and zero-egress Cloudflare R2
  • Downloadable plain-text summary of your estimate
  • Fast-loading, mobile-friendly, runs entirely in your browser
  • Useful as a repeatable check whenever data volume or traffic grows
  • Helps quantify the real dollar impact of egress-heavy workloads
  • Highlights when a zero-egress provider beats hyperscaler pricing

⚠️ Limitations

  • Excludes API request (PUT/GET/LIST) charges
  • Doesn't model minimum storage duration or early-deletion penalties
  • Doesn't model storage-class lifecycle transitions over time
  • Excludes archive-tier retrieval fees and time delays
  • Assumes a single static tier rather than a blended multi-tier strategy
  • Pricing snapshots can lag a provider's most recent rate change
  • Doesn't model regional price variation within a single provider
  • Not a substitute for your provider's live billing dashboard
Reference

Storage Tier Comparison

Per-GB storage and egress rates across providers

Provider / TierStorage $/GB/moEgress $/GBBest For
AWS S3 Standard$0.023$0.09Frequently accessed application data
AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive$0.00099$0.09Compliance/backup, rarely accessed
GCS Standard$0.020$0.12Frequently accessed application data
GCS Archive$0.0012$0.12Long-term archive, instantly accessible
Azure Hot$0.0184$0.087Frequently accessed application data
Azure Archive$0.00099$0.087Compliance/backup, rarely accessed
Cloudflare R2$0.015$0.00Egress-heavy, internet-facing workloads

Common Mistakes and Expert Tips

❌ Common Mistakes

  • Picking the cheapest storage rate without checking egress cost for a download-heavy app
  • Ignoring archive-tier retrieval delays when data might need fast access
  • Forgetting minimum storage duration penalties on cool/archive tiers
  • Using decimal (1,000 GB) instead of binary (1,024 GB) TB conversion when comparing by hand
  • Treating a single static tier estimate as a full lifecycle-policy cost model
  • Not re-checking pricing after a provider changes published rates

💡 Expert Tips & Best Practices

  • For egress-heavy workloads, always compare Cloudflare R2 against your hyperscaler baseline
  • Use the Data Transfer Cost Calculator for a deeper egress-only comparison across more providers
  • Model lifecycle transitions by running each stage (Hot → Cool → Archive) separately and summing
  • Check retrieval fees and delays before committing rarely-accessed-but-time-sensitive data to archive tiers
  • Re-run this calculator whenever your traffic or data footprint changes meaningfully
📝

Summary: This cloud storage cost calculator gives you an instant, free comparison of object storage pricing across 12 tiers from AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob, and Cloudflare R2, modeling storage and egress together to surface the true cheapest option. Pair it with the Data Transfer Cost Calculator and Cloud Cost Calculator for a complete infrastructure budget.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about cloud storage cost calculator estimates

Which cloud storage tier is cheapest for storage only?
For pure per-GB storage cost, deep archive tiers are cheapest: AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive ($0.00099/GB/mo) and Azure Archive ($0.00099/GB/mo) beat GCS Archive ($0.0012/GB/mo). But these tiers have retrieval delays of minutes to hours and retrieval fees, so they only make sense for data you rarely, if ever, need to access quickly.
Why does Cloudflare R2 show zero egress cost?
Cloudflare R2 was designed specifically to eliminate egress fees, which can dominate total cost for data-heavy applications. Its per-GB storage price ($0.015/GB/mo) is slightly higher than AWS S3 Standard, but if your workload serves a lot of data out to the internet, R2's zero egress fee often makes it cheaper overall than the hyperscalers once egress is factored in.
What's the difference between hot, cool/nearline, and archive tiers?
Hot/Standard tiers offer instant access at the highest per-GB price, designed for frequently accessed data. Cool/Nearline/Infrequent Access tiers cost less per GB but charge higher retrieval fees and often a minimum storage duration, suited to data accessed monthly or less. Archive/Cold tiers are cheapest per GB but can take minutes to hours to retrieve, and are meant for compliance or backup data rarely accessed.
Does this calculator include API request costs?
No — this tool models per-GB storage cost and per-GB egress (data transfer out) cost only, which are the two largest components of most storage bills. PUT/GET/LIST API request charges and early-deletion penalties on cold tiers are typically small relative to storage and egress but can add up for very high request-volume workloads — check your provider's request pricing separately.
How is annual cost calculated from the monthly estimate?
Annual cost is simply the total monthly cost (storage + egress) multiplied by 12, assuming your stored data volume and monthly egress stay constant. If your data grows over time, your actual annual bill will be higher than this straight-line estimate — rerun the calculator periodically as your footprint changes.
How does the calculator convert TB to GB?
It uses the binary conversion of 1 TB = 1,024 GB, matching how AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure meter object storage internally. If you enter 1 TB, the calculator treats that as 1,024 GB before multiplying by the selected tier's per-GB rate — not the decimal 1,000 GB some consumer storage marketing uses.
What does 'Cheapest Option' result actually compare?
It recomputes your exact data size and monthly egress volume against all 12 provider/tier combinations and returns whichever produces the lowest total monthly cost, tagging it with a "current" badge if it matches your selected tier. It's a same-workload apples-to-apples comparison, not a general ranking of cheapest storage overall.
Is AWS S3 Standard always more expensive than Cloudflare R2?
Not necessarily. R2's per-GB storage rate ($0.015) is lower than S3 Standard ($0.023), so R2 wins on storage-only comparisons too. But once you add S3's ~$0.09/GB egress fee against real download volume, the gap widens dramatically — R2 stays flat since it charges $0 egress, which is why egress-heavy, internet-facing workloads see the largest R2 savings.
Why is Azure Blob egress cheaper than AWS and GCP in this calculator?
This calculator uses approximate 2026 list-price egress rates of $0.09/GB for AWS, $0.12/GB for GCP, and $0.087/GB for Azure after typical free-tier allowances. These figures shift with region, committed-use discounts, and CDN offload, so treat the relative ordering as directionally useful rather than an exact quote for your account.
Do archive and cold tiers really have retrieval delays?
It depends on the provider. AWS S3 Glacier Deep Archive can take up to 12 hours to restore an object, and Azure Archive typically takes up to 15 hours (or about 1 hour with priority rehydration). Google Cloud Storage Archive is the exception — it stays instantly accessible like Standard, just billed at an archive-tier price with a higher per-GB retrieval fee instead of a time delay.
What's a realistic use case for S3 Glacier Deep Archive or Azure Archive?
Compliance records, legal holds, long-term database backups, and disaster-recovery copies that you hope to never touch are the classic fit — data where a 12-hour restore delay is an acceptable tradeoff for a storage price roughly 20x cheaper than the Standard/Hot tier. Active application data or anything a user might request live should stay in a hot or infrequent-access tier instead.
How do minimum storage duration fees work on cool and archive tiers?
Infrequent Access, Nearline/Coldline, and Archive tiers typically charge an early-deletion penalty if you delete or move an object before a minimum retention period — commonly 30 days for IA/Cool/Nearline tiers, 90 days for Coldline, and 180-365 days for deep archive tiers. This calculator doesn't model those penalties, so factor them in separately if your data churns quickly.
Should I pick storage tier based on cost alone?
No — retrieval latency and minimum storage duration matter as much as price for most workloads. A tier that's cheapest on paper can cost more in practice if frequent, unplanned retrievals trigger per-GB retrieval fees or early-deletion penalties. Use this calculator's cost estimate alongside your actual access pattern, not as the only input to a tier decision.
Can I use this calculator to compare a multi-cloud storage strategy?
Yes — run the same data size and egress volume against an AWS tier, a GCS tier, and an Azure tier separately to see each provider's total cost side by side, then check the bar chart for a full ranking. Many teams split workloads: hot data on one provider's cheapest hot tier, cold backups on whichever provider's archive tier is lowest for their specific size and access pattern.
Does this calculator account for storage class transitions or lifecycle policies?
No — it estimates a single, static tier selection at a fixed data size and egress volume. Real-world lifecycle policies that auto-transition objects from Standard to Infrequent Access to Archive as they age can lower blended costs significantly; model each lifecycle stage separately in this calculator and sum the results for a more realistic multi-tier estimate.
How often is the pricing data in this calculator updated?
The NeftCal editorial team reviews and updates per-GB storage and egress rates whenever AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, or Cloudflare change published list pricing, with a full audit at least quarterly. The page displays the last-updated date near the About section — always cross-check the provider's live pricing page before finalizing a budget.
Learn More

Authoritative Resources on Cloud Object Storage Pricing

Official documentation to complement this calculator

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