
Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS - QuinnyPig
https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calculator/
======
axegon_
Given my experience with AWS, I doubt this is reliable in any way... Every
bill I've ever seen(and paid personally for that matter) felt a bit like
someone played darts blindfolded. One that really struck me (around 3 years
ago when I decided to move over to gcp) was two consecutive months: my usage
was 99.2% identical. First month my bill was around 151.01 euros. Second month
it was 235.32. Everything was absolutely identical, API's usage, storage,
traffic, everything. I compiled a report sent it over to their support and I
got a convoluted response which could roughly be summarized with ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

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memset
I am not sure why this is the highest-voted comment. The OP has shared a tool
which performs a calculation for a pricing estimation. This comment does not
address the metrics, or the accuracy, of the calculator. It makes a complaint
about AWS pricing, but does not attempt to evaluate or comment on the post, or
even provide evidence for the unrelated claim about AWS.

~~~
Operyl
HN comment sorting is weird. It’s not based solely on upvotes, as far as I can
guess. Probably a mixture of upvotes/downvotes/flags much like the homepage
is.

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QuinnyPig
AWS is deprecating their trusty pricing calculator in favor of one that makes
you describe what you're building first, and this makes me sad.

This one only works internally to one region at a time, but it compares
various costs in different storage mechanisms on an apples-to-apples basis as
best I can.

~~~
ignoramous
> _AWS is deprecating their trusty pricing calculator..._

Is AWS deprecating the simple-calculator [0]? Frustratingly, it has been
neglected and has never supported many aws services.

> _...in favor of one that makes you describe what you 're building first, and
> this makes me sad._

[https://calculator.aws](https://calculator.aws) is pretty good, to be honest.

Or, are you referring to the TCO calculator [1]?

\---

[0]
[https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html](https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html)

[1] [https://awstcocalculator.com/](https://awstcocalculator.com/)

~~~
mike_aarons
[https://calculator.aws](https://calculator.aws) is good but it takes extra
clicks. Having something lighter (if all you care about is storage) is pretty
nice.

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ernsheong
1TB in GCP Cloud Storage's Archive storage class is just $1.20 per month.
[https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=8404213d-ef...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=8404213d-ef9e-4b1a-b5ce-541631c1345c)

Retrieval is within seconds, not hours like in Glacier.

~~~
rob-olmos
Impressive to me but $50 to retrieve 1TB vs cheaper tiers on AWS for slower. I
don't know what GCP's retrieval throughput is though.

~~~
anakaiti
There's also B2, with 5$/TB for storage & 10$/TB for retrieval [0].

\---

[0] [https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-
pricing.html](https://www.backblaze.com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html)

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sl1ck731
I like the design, but is anyone choosing storage based on price? I can see
comparing cloud-to-cloud, but within a single cloud the type of data (blob,
block, database, etc...) and the frequency of r/w prescribe the storage you
should be using regardless of price.

I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move from EFS to EBS
or such because its 8% of the price. I chose EFS for a reason in the first
place.

Not meaning offense, I'm just unsure of usefulness. Appreciate all the content
you provide though! Didn't realize who you were :)

~~~
txcwpalpha
>I just don't see a scenario where I say I'm just going to move from EFS to
EBS or such. I chose EFS for a reason in the first place.

How about when your team has terabytes of data stored in EFS that is only used
sporadically and now you want to move it off? (maybe you started with EFS
because it makes the most sense for your application but now you have a lot of
older data that you still want to keep but don't necessarily need it to be
accessed by the application anymore). Something like this helps justify how
much you could save by starting that migration project.

I do see your point though. IME, calculators like this are used more for
management who are trying to estimate their budget for planning purposes (as
in, I have a team that tells me they will need 5 TB of S3 storage, how much is
that going to cost me?), not necessarily by devs making architecture
decisions.

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kaydub
If you have the latitude of moving from file storage to block storage you
should already be doing it. I'd say you chose the wrong use case from the
start, which also backs up his point.

~~~
txcwpalpha
The point is that you may not be able to use block storage at the start, but
as time goes on your needs may change, giving you more latitude.

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bscanlan
It's clearly missing storing data uuencoded in Route53 TXT records.

~~~
scarface74
Or you can get 75GB free by using Lambda....

[https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-
cloud...](https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/how-to-
get-75-gigs-of-free-storage-in-aws-with-xssfox/)

(Yes this is a joke)

~~~
jedberg
It's because of thoughts like this that the number of tags per item is
limited.

Initially they were going to allow unlimited tags until someone pointed out
that you could use tags on your items as a poor mans key/value store for free.

~~~
erik_seaberg
I'm reminded of people who use S3 as an eventually-consistent database. Encode
your rows in CSV and use them as names of empty objects. Query using paginated
LIST requests for a prefix of the columns.

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sokoloff
The price for Glacier Deep Archive is wrong.

I entered {50GB, US-East-<either>} and got a price of $1.05/mo. I think the
actual price is $0.0495/mo (just under a nickel).

(Less worrying, I don't see Glacier [normal] at all.)

~~~
QuinnyPig
You found two bugs. Awesome! Fixing.

I also never use normal Glacier at all (which is how this got missed in
testing), but the pricing's all there on the backend. It's a frontend thing...

~~~
QuinnyPig
...aaaand it's an AWS renaming thing in their pricing API. Lovely!

AWS is so bad at naming things that it apparently now breaks other things too.

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cure
Everything is relative: compared to Azure virtual machine family naming, AWS
is not so bad!

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BurningFrog
So my cost is $69. But it doesn't say per what!

I assume it's per month, but it really should say.

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myroon5
It's back up in the top right:

"Your monthly payment will be:"

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BurningFrog
Not on the page I get: [https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-
storage-calcu...](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-
calculator/?storage=3&units=20&region=uswest2&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs)

~~~
myroon5
bit odd but only visible after selecting options for both:

"Where is your data currently?"

"Which tier are you using?"

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renewiltord
Glacier hasn't really seemed like it's worth it for me and looking over this
calculator it's almost as expensive as Standard mode? Why would I use it over
Standard, let alone Intelligent Tiering - Infrequent Access.

~~~
txcwpalpha
This calculator is either giving completely wrong outputs for the Glacier
pricing, or it's secretly throwing in some of the other costs like data
transfer/API request costs.

For example, for 50 GB it's showing a cost per month of $1.15 for Standard,
which is correct (Standard is priced at ~$0.023/GB). For Deep Glacier, it's
giving pricing of $1.05 (which is wildly incorrect, as the price for Deep
Glacier is ~$0.00099/GB, meaning the monthly cost _should_ say $0.05, or less
than 5% of the Standard cost).

~~~
mjulian
Yeah, we're investigating what's going on with this. Seems there's a bug in
the public price list we're trying to work out.

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xcavier
The fact that a 3rd party feels the need to publish a calculator suggests it
is not ‘simple’

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mike_aarons
The mindblown platypus when you enter a high petabyte value is cute. I like it
:)

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res0nat0r
This doesn't seem quite right at least for Glacier Deep Archive. I put 12TB in
Ohio in Deep Archive and it is saying it should cost $250. It should cost
~$12. Maybe just some math typos in the calculator?

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speedgoose
Did you consider to replace the AWS' names and technical terms by generic
terms and their explanations, so it's easier to understand for people not
familiar with AWS' storage offers?

~~~
QuinnyPig
Yes, but that feels a bit out of scope for this calculator. Including all of
the trade-offs between different storage services and when to use each results
in basically rewriting the AWS marketing pages.

That's a different project of mine. :-)

~~~
ignoramous
Related: _AWS in plain english_ (re-write of just the product names),
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10202286)

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zceee12
S3 transition costs rely on knowing the number of objects being stored and are
independent of storage size. If you’re moving between S3 tiers, this tool
provides no input for the number of objects being transitioned. These costs
can be non-trivial. Predicted savings involving S3 transitions also need to
consider minimum storage duration. Consequently, this feels like a misleading
tool. It would probably benefit from showing proof of working.

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hendry
What... "Standard - Infrequent Access" & "One Zone - Infrequent Access" is
cheaper than Glacier Deep Archive??

5TB in ap-southeast-1 is what I plugged in.

~~~
ignoramous
Either the webpage is incorrect or uses a non-obvious formula to calculate
inclusive costs (Data Retrieval, Data scanned, API charges along with Data
storage)?

Re: Storage: Deep Archive's ~$0.001 per GiB whilst IA buckets are ~$0.01; a
10x difference.

API charges for data retrieval from Deep Archive is 100x (?) (~$0.1004 per
thousand reqs) expensive than IA buckets ($0.001).

Data retrieval for Deep Archive is 2x ($0.02 per GiB) the cost of IA ($0.01).

[https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/](https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/)

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xhkkffbf
This is nice, but is it the price per month? Per year?

~~~
dangwu
It's monthly, but yes they should add this information.

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sciurus
This is neat.

[https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-
calcu...](https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-
calculator/?storage=1000&units=10&region=useast1&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs)
is a way to show "how much more expensive is X than S3"?

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kondro
This is cool, but the EFS infrequent access pricing for Australia looks wrong.
Shouldn't 100GB cost $2.72 (not $1.20)?

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jgalt212
With the cloud, I have learn about computers and I have to learn about
AWS/GCP/Azure's version of computers. The cognitive overload just barely
equals not having to maintain my own boxes.

Pick you poison, maintain your own boxes or maintain your own YAML files and
spend a lot of time trying to figure out billing.

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johnchristopher
Newbie question: which Amazon storage services can be used to add storage to a
VPS ? Storage that would be used like a secondary disk. My VPS provider is
asking way too much to my taste ($50 a year for 40Gb disk I think) when
comparing with Amazon.

Is it possible at all to mount some amazon storage like I would for a block
device ?

~~~
txcwpalpha
If you can move your VPS over to Amazon, EBS (Elastic Block Store) is what you
are looking for, but it's likely not much cheaper than you're currently paying
(EBS is priced at $0.10/month per gb, so $4/mo for 40gb of general purpose).

You _can_ mount S3 buckets as a hard disk on a VPS, but that isn't the main
use case for S3.

~~~
kaydub
$4/mo, not $40/mo

~~~
txcwpalpha
Lol yep, thanks. Fixed. I think I was an order of magnitude off because the
parent comment was stating his costs in years. D'oh.

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ceocoder
`QuinnyPig - I love the extra mind blown platypus touch when you enter 40000
PB

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqdpkiv0ikevsm4/IMG_1937.jpg?dl=0](https://www.dropbox.com/s/eqdpkiv0ikevsm4/IMG_1937.jpg?dl=0)

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_air
The mindblown graphic that comes up when you enter a rather large data size is
delightful :)

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EnigmaticProg
This list doesn't showcase FSx[0] as an option.

\---

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/](https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/)

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pavelevst
Would be nice to see other cloud providers for comparison

~~~
QuinnyPig
Generally I find that whenever I'm doing storage calculations it's for
existing workloads inside of a given cloud provider. "We're moving the whole
thing to GCP because it's going to be X% cheaper" sounds compelling, but... I
just don't see it happening at anything other than small scale.

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cvaidya1986
Excellent design :)

~~~
QuinnyPig
Thanks! It didn't fall flatypus.

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based2
0 for dynamodb ?

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bluntfang
is this just an ad?

