Cloud Computing Cost Calculator

How Does This Calculator Work?

This calculator provides a simplified estimate of your potential cloud computing costs by focusing on the three core components of any cloud deployment. It uses average industry pricing to give you a ballpark figure:

1. Compute Cost: This is calculated based on the number and size of your virtual machines (VMs). Each instance size has an estimated monthly cost, and we multiply that by the number of instances you need. This is typically the largest part of a cloud bill.
2. Storage Cost: This is calculated based on the total amount of storage (in GB) and the type you choose (faster, more expensive SSD or cheaper HDD). We use an average monthly cost per GB for each type.
3. Data Transfer Cost: We estimate the cost of "data egress"—data leaving the cloud provider's network. While the first few GB are often free, we apply an average cost per GB for any amount beyond the free tier.

The monthly costs for these three areas are summed up to provide your total estimated monthly and annual cloud spend.

The $300,000 Surprise Bill: A Cloud Cost Horror Story

In 2016, a small French startup was using Google Cloud Platform for their mobile app. One of their developers made a tiny mistake. He was running a process to sync data to their search service, Elasticsearch. Due to a bug in the script, instead of running once, the process started running in an infinite loop, creating thousands of new server requests every second.

Because the cloud is designed to be elastic and scale automatically, the system did exactly what it was told to do: it kept providing more and more resources to handle the endless requests. No alarms were triggered because, from the system's perspective, this looked like a massive, legitimate surge in user traffic. The team didn't notice anything was wrong over the weekend.

When they came in on Monday morning, they were greeted with a bill for nearly $300,000 for just 72 hours of usage. This single coding error nearly bankrupted the company. This story is a powerful lesson in the double-edged sword of the cloud. The same auto-scaling power that lets Netflix handle millions of viewers can also create a financial disaster from one small mistake. It highlights why cost monitoring, setting budget alerts, and using calculators like this one to understand potential spend are not just good practices—they are essential for survival in the cloud.

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