Cloud Infrastructure Cost Estimator
Estimate cloud costs before you deploy your Terraform or IaC scripts.
Plan your infrastructure spending with confidence. This tool helps DevOps and cloud engineers estimate monthly costs for common resources like compute, storage, and networking across AWS, GCP, and Azure. Avoid bill shock and make data-driven architecture decisions.
Cloud Infrastructure Cost Estimator
Estimate your monthly cloud bill for compute, storage, and bandwidth across AWS, GCP, and Azure.
About This Tool
The Cloud Infrastructure Cost Estimator is a crucial budgeting tool for any team using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Bicep. Before you run `terraform apply`, it's critical to have a clear understanding of the financial impact of the resources you're about to provision. This calculator provides a high-level, simplified way to do just that. By inputting counts of common resources—general-purpose compute instances, block storage, and data egress—you can get an instant, comparative monthly cost estimate across the three major cloud providers: AWS, GCP, and Azure. While not a replacement for official, detailed pricing calculators, this tool is designed for quick, early-stage planning. It helps engineers and financial planners to forecast budgets, compare the cost-effectiveness of different clouds for a given workload, and facilitate conversations about cost optimization long before a single resource is deployed.
How to Use This Tool
- Use the sliders to input the number of general-purpose compute instances you plan to deploy.
- Enter the total amount of block storage (e.g., EBS, Persistent Disk) you will need in GB.
- Estimate the total amount of data egress (data transferred out to the internet) per month in GB.
- Click "Estimate Cloud Costs" to see the results.
- The chart will display a side-by-side comparison of the estimated monthly bill for AWS, GCP, and Azure.
- Hover over the chart bars to see a breakdown of costs by compute, storage, and bandwidth.
In-Depth Guide
The Three Pillars of Cloud Cost
For most applications, cloud costs are driven by three main components, which this calculator focuses on. **Compute:** This is the cost of your virtual machines (e.g., AWS EC2, GCP Compute Engine). It's billed per hour based on instance size and family. **Storage:** This is the cost of your block storage volumes that are attached to your VMs. It's billed per GB-month. **Bandwidth:** This refers to data transfer, specifically "egress" (data leaving the cloud provider's network). Ingress is almost always free, but egress is a significant and often overlooked cost.
Why This is an Estimate
Cloud pricing is incredibly complex. There are hundreds of instance types, dozens of storage tiers, and pricing that varies by region. This tool simplifies this complexity by using a representative, "middle-of-the-road" price for a common, general-purpose resource in a major US region for each provider. For example, the compute cost is based on a standard 2-vCPU instance. This provides a valid basis for comparison and high-level budgeting, but for a precise, production-grade cost estimate, you must use the official pricing calculators from each provider.
Connecting to Terraform and IaC
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform have revolutionized how we manage the cloud. They allow you to define your entire infrastructure in version-controlled, human-readable files. The danger is that a simple change, like increasing a `count` variable from 10 to 100, can have massive financial consequences. That's why cost estimation should be a core part of the IaC workflow. While this tool provides a manual way to do this, advanced teams integrate tools like `infracost` directly into their pull request process, so that every proposed change automatically comes with a cost estimate.
FinOps: The Discipline of Cloud Cost Management
The practice of managing cloud costs has become a dedicated discipline known as FinOps. It brings financial accountability to the variable spend model of the cloud. Key FinOps practices include forecasting, budget allocation, cost anomaly detection, and promoting a culture of cost awareness among developers. Tools like this calculator are a great first step in building a FinOps mindset within your team, encouraging engineers to think about the cost implications of their architectural decisions.