Bandwidth Cost Calculator

Cloud and hosting bills have a line that surprises people: data transfer. It is usually charged on outbound traffic only, with a free allowance and a price per gigabyte that falls as volume grows. The page lets you enter your provider’s rates and your expected traffic and returns the monthly and annual cost.

How egress pricing is built

Providers typically charge for bytes that leave their network, not for bytes that come in. A small monthly allowance is free. Beyond it, the first block of traffic costs a price per gigabyte, the next block a lower price, and so on, so the average cost per gigabyte falls as volume rises. The tiers apply to slices of the volume, not to the whole: if the first tier ends at 10 TB, only the traffic up to that point costs the first-tier price, and the rest moves to the next. The page applies exactly that logic to the numbers you enter.

Entering your numbers

Choose whether you know the traffic in gigabytes per month or as an average rate in Mbit/s; the rate is converted to gigabytes over a 30-day month. Then fill in the free allowance and the three tiers: price per GB and where each tier ends (leave the second tier’s end at 0 for “no more tiers”). The two example buttons load illustrative values, a tiered scheme and a flat price for 5 TB, and the page notes that they are not a real price list. Prices are used as typed, in whatever currency you use.

What is not included

Many bills have more than egress. Taxes, minimum commitments, request fees, charges for traffic between regions or availability zones, NAT gateway processing, CDN pricing and the fees of separate services all sit outside this estimate. Providers also differ in how they count: most use decimal gigabytes, some use binary gibibytes, and some round per resource. Treat the result as a planning figure to compare scenarios, such as “what if traffic doubles?” or “does a CDN with a flat price save money?”.

A worked example

The first example has 15,000 GB of outbound traffic a month with a free allowance of 100 GB, so 14,900 GB is billable. The first tier covers 10,240 GB (10 TB) at 0.09 per GB, which costs 921.60; the remaining 4,660 GB are in the second tier at 0.085 per GB, which costs 396.10. The monthly total is 1,317.70, the yearly total 15,812.40, and the average cost across all traffic is 0.0878 per GB. These prices are only an illustration of how tiers work.

Limits

The calculator multiplies and sums; it does not read a provider’s price list, check regions or know your contract. Traffic is assumed steady and billed per month, and an average rate hides peaks. When you only know the size of your site’s pages, multiply by visits to get the volume. For bandwidth planning rather than billing, the Network Goodput Calculator shows how much of a link carries data.

Related tools

• Network Goodput Calculator shows real data throughput on a link.
• CCTV Storage Calculator converts stream bitrates into stored data.
• Byte Converter switches between GB, GiB, TB and TiB.
• SLA Uptime Calculator translates availability promises into minutes.