Cloud Cost Calculator
Price the meter — hourly rate × hours × instances, with the egress wire and the commitment ladder beside it.
Cloud Cost Calculator
Results recalculate instantly on every keystroke. Nothing you type is transmitted.
What this result does not account for
- One shape — no multi-instance architecture pricing
- Egress modeled in the first band only
In short: 1 instance at $0.0416 an hour for 730 hours bills $30.37 of compute, and the first 100 GB of egress bills $0.00 — the free tier covers it. That exact shape is the published t3.medium on-demand line in us-east-1. Commit to a year and the same compute reads about $17.75 (42% off); three years reads about $11.42 (63%); spot prices interruptions at up to 90% off. Metered servers reward commitment and punish idling.
Formula
compute = rate × instances × hours; egress = max(0, GB − 100) × $0.09
Cloud compute is a meter: a published hourly rate times the hours the shape runs, times how many shapes run. A month runs 720–744 hours; the industry quotes 730. Internet egress is billed separately by the GB — the first 100 GB a month is free account-wide, then $0.09/GB in the first 10 TB band. Commitments reprice the same compute: 1-year reserved runs about 58% of on-demand, 3-year about 38%, and spot can read a tenth of it if the workload survives interruption.
Worked Example
- Enter the shape's published hourly rate and how many run.
- Enter real hours — 730 is a month; 180 is a workday habit.
- Read the compute bill, the egress bill and what a commitment would reprice it to.
Defaults: $30.37 compute, $0.00 egress — the published t3.medium month. Drive to 3 instances and 500 GB out: $91.10 of compute ($91.104 exactly) plus $36.00 of egress (400 billable GB at $0.09) = $127.10 all in.
Strengths & Limits Of This Model
Where this engine is strong
- Published rates as presets — the bill is checkable
- Commitment ladder reprices the same compute honestly
Where it stops
- Storage and licenses bill elsewhere
Practical Use Cases
Shape comparisons
the hourly line is the whole product
Commitment decisions
reserved and spot against on-demand
Egress forecasting
the wire bill nobody scoped
Methodology & Editorial Standards
Computation runs in IEEE-754 double precision at full internal precision; rounding to two decimal places occurs strictly at the display layer, so no cumulative drift enters the result. All monetary outputs use accounting presentation — grouped thousands, two decimals, negatives in parentheses — so figures can be transcribed directly into a model or working paper. Division-by-zero and out-of-domain inputs return an em-dash rather than a misleading number.
This engine was reconciled against an independent reference implementation and hand-verified for the worked example above before release. Our full five-stage review process is published on the About Us page.
Disclaimer. This calculator is provided for informational and modelling purposes only and does not constitute financial, tax, legal, medical, or engineering advice. Verify all figures with a qualified professional before acting on them.
Cloud Cost Calculator — 8 Expert FAQs
8 analyst-written answers to the questions practitioners actually ask — optimised for voice and answer-engine retrieval.
Where does $0.0416 an hour come from?
It is the published Linux on-demand rate for a t3.medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB) in us-east-1 — about $30.37 over a 730-hour month. The field takes any published rate; the presets are the familiar general-purpose ladder.
Why 730 hours?
Because 8,760 hours a year divides to 730 a month on average. A 31-day month runs 744; February runs 672; the industry quotes 730 for always-on shapes.
What is the free egress tier?
The first 100 GB of internet egress a month is free, account-wide, permanently (it stopped being a 12-month intro perk in 2025). Past it, the first band bills $0.09/GB. Inbound is always free.
How much do commitments actually save?
Published lines for the default shape: about 42% off on a 1-year reserved ($17.75 a month), about 63% off on 3-year ($11.42), and spot from 60 to 91% off depending on region and hour — in exchange for interruption risk or a commitment you cannot leave.
Spot or reserved?
Reserved for the load that must run and does; spot for the work that can rerun — batch, CI, fault-tolerant queues. A web frontend on spot is a coin-flip outage; a render farm on reserved is money left burning.
What does the bill NOT include?
Block storage, snapshots, load balancers, licensed images and support plans all bill separately. The two lines here — compute and egress — are the dominant pair on most simple architectures, and the egress line is the one that surprises.
How is this different from the hosting cost page?
That page prices the flat monthly ladder hosts sell (promo in, renewal out); this page prices the meter. Flat hosting is a subscription; cloud is a taxi fare — cheaper to idle, expensive to forget.
Why does my real bill run higher?
Because real architectures multiply shapes, and every shape carries its own storage and wire. Price the dominant shape here to sanity-check the quote you were handed — then audit the bill line by line, because the meter never sleeps.