Cloud Storage Calculator
Gigabytes, months and the tier rate — the storage line of the bill, with the cold ladder priced beside it.
Cloud Storage Calculator
Results recalculate instantly on every keystroke. Nothing you type is transmitted.
What this result does not account for
- Storage meter only — requests, retrieval and egress excluded
- First-tier list rates; your volume pricing may differ
In short: One terabyte on the standard tier is $0.023 a GB-month: $23.000000 a month, $276.000000 for a year. The cold ladder prices the same terabyte downward — $150.000000 infrequent, $48.000000 glacier-instant, $11.880000 deep archive — and each rung down trades storage pennies for retrieval fees and slower reads. The storage line is one of four meters; egress out at about $0.09 a GB is the one that bites on restore.
Formula
cost = GB × rate × months
Object storage bills one product: gigabyte-months. Everything else on the invoice — requests, retrieval, egress — lives outside this product and outside this page, which is why the cold ladder is presented as a ladder and not a recommendation: the deep-archive rung holds bytes for a tenth of a cent but charges for every pull and waits hours for the privilege. Tier choice is an access-pattern decision; this division only prices it.
Worked Example
- Enter the data you hold, in gigabytes.
- Enter how many months it stays.
- Pick the tier rate — or type your own.
- Read the bill and the colder rungs beside it.
Defaults: 1,000 GB for 12 months at $0.023 → $276.000000. Drive 10,000 GB for 24 months on deep archive → $237.600000 — a terabyte-year for less than a decent dinner.
Strengths & Limits Of This Model
Where this engine is strong
- The cold ladder priced beside the picked tier
- Egress reality named on the page
Where it stops
- No lifecycle or early-deletion modeling
Practical Use Cases
Budget lines
the storage meter, monthly and yearly
Tier shopping
the cold ladder on your own volume
Archive bids
deep-archive holds, priced honestly
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 Storage Calculator — 8 Expert FAQs
8 analyst-written answers to the questions practitioners actually ask — optimised for voice and answer-engine retrieval.
How much does 1 TB of cloud storage cost?
On the standard tier at $0.023 a GB-month, a terabyte is $23.000000 a month and $276.000000 a year. The same terabyte slides to $150.000000 on infrequent access, $48.000000 on glacier instant and $11.880000 on deep archive — with retrieval fees and wait times rising as the price falls.
What is the difference between the storage tiers?
Standard keeps bytes instantly readable at the highest rate; infrequent access cuts the rate about in half and adds a per-GB retrieval fee plus a 30-day minimum; the glacier rungs cut storage to a tenth of a cent but bill for every retrieval and take minutes to hours. Pick by how often the bytes are read, not by the storage price alone.
What does cloud storage cost per GB per year?
Multiply the monthly rate by twelve: standard is about $0.276 a GB-year, deep archive about $0.0119. A terabyte-year therefore runs $276.000000 hot and $11.880000 frozen — enter the months and the rate does the rest. Volume discounts step in past tens of terabytes on most sheets.
Why is my storage bill higher than this calculator?
Because storage is one meter of four: requests, retrieval fees and egress bill separately, and lifecycle rules that delete early can trigger early-deletion charges. A restore-heavy month can out-bill storage several times over. Price the bytes-at-rest here; audit the other meters in the bill itself.
How much does it cost to download my data back?
Egress out of a major cloud runs about $0.09 a GB on the first tens of terabytes — so pulling a terabyte back out costs on the order of $90, more than the storage cost it in some tiers. The deep rungs add per-GB retrieval on top. Ingress is essentially free; the door swings one way cheaply.
Is deep archive worth it for backups?
For bytes you will genuinely never read before deletion, yes — $11.880000 a terabyte-year is the cheapest honest shelf in cloud computing. For anything you might restore in a hurry, the retrieval fee and the hours-long wait are the real price. The classic compromise keeps a warm copy of small, urgent data and freezes the bulk.
How do I calculate cost for growing storage?
The rate is linear: average the footprint across the window and multiply. A set that grows from one to two terabytes over a year bills like 1.5 TB average — about $414.000000 on standard. For compounding growth, the database size page projects the footprint first, then this page prices it.
Do the tier prices here include everything?
No — and the page says so on purpose. The rates are the published first-tier storage lines for a major cloud's US region; your negotiated rate, region and volume step may differ, and requests, retrieval and egress always bill separately. Treat the output as the storage meter, not the whole invoice.