Cloud Storage Effective Cost Calculator
Most cloud storage comparisons rank providers by price per TB stored. That is the number vendors advertise, and it is rarely the number that decides your bill. Egress — the cost of getting your data back out — is what separates a cheap provider from an expensive one, and it depends entirely on how much you actually read.
So this calculator does not tell you who is cheapest. It works out your effective cost per TB atyour read volume, and the egress level at which the ranking flips.
The number that actually decides it
A provider charging more to store but nothing to read can be far cheaper than a headline-cheap one, and the crossover is often at a surprisingly low read volume. That crossover — thebreak-even egress — is the number worth knowing before you commit, because it tells you how much your bill depends on a usage pattern you may not control.
If your break-even sits just above your current egress, you are one busy month away from the other provider being cheaper. That is a fragility worth seeing before you migrate a few hundred terabytes.
What this does not include
- Request charges (PUT/GET per million), which matter for many small objects rather than few large ones
- Minimum storage duration and early-deletion fees on cold tiers
- Retrieval fees on archival tiers, which are separate from egress
- Cross-region replication, and inter-region transfer
Those can dominate specific workloads. This tool covers the two variables that dominate most of them, and states its boundary rather than implying completeness.