How to use the Storage Cost
- Enter stored volume in GB and the per-GB monthly rate.
- Add monthly read and write request counts.
- Enter expected egress in GB and its per-GB rate.
- Compare the three lines to see which one dominates your bill.
How the calculation works
Total = capacity × rate + requests × per-request price + egress × egress rate. Standard object storage runs around 0.023 per GB-month, so a terabyte costs roughly 23 — trivial next to egress at 0.05–0.09 per GB, which makes serving that terabyte once cost two to four times as much as storing it for a month. Ingress is normally free, which is the asymmetry that produces lock-in.
Storage classes trade retrieval cost for capacity cost. Infrequent-access tiers cut per-GB pricing by roughly half but add retrieval fees and minimum storage durations; archive tiers are an order of magnitude cheaper to hold but charge meaningfully to restore and can take hours. Tiering only pays when access is genuinely rare — moving hot data to archive costs more than leaving it in standard. Request charges matter most for many small objects, where per-request pricing can exceed the capacity line entirely.
Cost = GB × rate + (requests / 1000) × request price + egress GB × egress rateSource: Cloud object storage pricing structure (capacity, request, egress) per AWS S3, GCS and Azure Blob models.
Worked example
1,400 GB stored at 0.023, 2.5 million GET requests at 0.0004 per 1,000, 900 GB egress at 0.085.
- Capacity = 1,400 × 0.023 = 32.20.
- Requests = 2,500 × 0.0004 = 1.00.
- Egress = 900 × 0.085 = 76.50.
- Total = 109.70.
About 110 a month, of which 70% is egress — not storage.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my bill higher than capacity × rate?+
Egress and request charges are usually the larger share, especially for public-facing content.
Should I use an archive tier?+
Only for data you genuinely rarely read. Retrieval fees and minimum durations can exceed the capacity savings.
How do I cut egress costs?+
Put a CDN in front of the bucket, cache aggressively, and compress assets before serving them.
Is GB here 1000 or 1024 MB?+
Cloud providers bill in decimal GB (10⁹ bytes), while operating systems often display binary GiB — a 7% difference.
Last reviewed August 31, 2026. We review this page whenever the underlying formula, tax year, published rate or standard changes.