Cloud Firewall & WAF Rule Cost Estimator
Estimate monthly spend on cloud firewall and WAF services by modeling rule counts and traffic volumes.
Helps security teams estimate monthly spend on cloud firewall and WAF services by modeling rule counts and traffic volumes. Plan your security budget and optimize costs for AWS WAF, Azure WAF, and Cloudflare.
Cloud Firewall & WAF Rule Cost Estimator
Estimate monthly spend on cloud firewall and WAF services by modeling rule counts and traffic volumes.
This estimate is based on the pricing you provide for rule and request processing. It does not include costs for WAF logs, which are often sent to a separate logging service and can be a significant additional expense.
About This Tool
The Cloud Firewall & WAF Rule Cost Estimator is a specialized financial tool for security engineers, DevOps teams, and FinOps professionals. Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are a critical layer of defense, but their pricing models can be complex, often involving multiple dimensions such as a base fee, a cost per million requests, and a fee for each rule you deploy. This complexity can make budgeting difficult and lead to unexpected costs. Our calculator simplifies this by allowing you to input your expected traffic volume and rule count, along with your provider's pricing, to generate a clear monthly cost estimate. It breaks down the costs by component—requests, rules, and data processing—so you can understand your primary cost drivers and make informed decisions about your security architecture and budget.
How to Use This Tool
- Enter your total expected HTTP requests per month.
- Input the total number of custom WAF rules you plan to deploy.
- Enter the average size of your HTTP requests in kilobytes to estimate data processing.
- In the "Cloud Provider Pricing" section, enter the specific costs from your provider's pricing page.
- Click "Calculate Firewall Costs" to see the estimated monthly bill.
- Review the cost breakdown to see whether request volume, rule count, or data processing is your biggest expense.
In-Depth Guide
Understanding WAF & Cloud Firewall Pricing
Cloud WAF pricing is typically multi-dimensional. The most common components are: 1. **Base Fee:** A fixed monthly cost for the service itself. 2. **Request Volume:** A charge per million requests that the WAF inspects. This is often the largest cost component. 3. **Rule Count:** A monthly fee for each custom rule you create and deploy. 4. **Data Processing:** A per-GB fee for the data that flows through the WAF, similar to egress fees. This calculator models these last three variable components to help you estimate your bill.
Managed Rules vs. Custom Rules
Most WAF providers offer "Managed Rule Sets." These are collections of pre-written rules curated by security experts to protect against common vulnerabilities like the OWASP Top 10, SQL injection, and cross-site scripting (XSS). These managed sets often have a fixed monthly price that is cheaper than creating and maintaining dozens of equivalent custom rules yourself. Using managed rules is a highly recommended best practice for both security and cost-effectiveness.
The Hidden Cost: Logging
This calculator estimates the cost of the WAF service itself, but a major related cost is logging. WAFs can generate a huge volume of logs, especially if you log all requests. These logs are typically sent to a service like AWS CloudWatch or Datadog, which has its own ingestion and storage costs. A comprehensive cost analysis must also include the expense of managing WAF logs. To control this, consider only logging blocked or flagged requests rather than all traffic.
WAF Placement in Your Architecture
Where you place your WAF matters. The most common and effective place is at the edge of your network, often integrated with your CDN or Load Balancer. This ensures that malicious traffic is blocked before it ever reaches your application servers. Placing the WAF behind a CDN that caches content is a powerful cost-saving measure, as it reduces the volume of requests the WAF needs to inspect.