Cloud Cost Optimization Calculator

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Stop Overspending on Cloud: Your Guide to Our Cost Calculator

Are you paying too much for your cloud services? For many businesses, cloud bills can feel unpredictable and grow without warning. You’re focused on building great products, but managing cloud spend often becomes a complex, time-consuming task.

Our Cloud Cost Optimization Calculator is a simple tool designed to give you a quick estimate of your potential savings. You don’t need to be a FinOps expert. By answering a few questions about your current usage, you can uncover key areas where you can reduce your AWS, Azure, or GCP costs.

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How the Calculator Finds Your Savings

The calculator focuses on the three most common sources of cloud waste. Understanding them is the first step toward better cloud financial management.

1. Compute Right-Sizing

This is the single biggest opportunity for savings. Right-sizing means matching your virtual machine (VM) or instance size to its actual workload. Many teams intentionally over-provision resources “just in case,” but that’s like paying for a 10-ton truck to deliver a pizza.

• What to enter: Put in your total monthly cost for compute instances (like Amazon EC2 or Azure VMs). Then, use the slider to estimate how much you think your servers are over-provisioned. A 30-40% over-provisioning is a very common starting point. This helps identify savings from tackling underutilized resources.

2. Idle Resource Cleanup

This is the easiest money you’ll ever save. Idle resources are services you are paying for but not actually using. Think of them as “zombie assets” in your account. Common examples include unattached EBS volumes (storage disks not connected to a server) or load balancers with no traffic.

• What to enter: Estimate the monthly cost of any resources you know are sitting idle. Deleting this cloud waste results in 100% savings.

3. Commitment Discounts

Cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and GCP offer huge discounts if you commit to using their services for one or three years. These are known as Reserved Instances (RIs) or Savings Plans. This is perfect for your stable, predictable workloads that run 24/7.

• What to enter: Input the portion of your monthly compute bill that you know is for steady, always-on applications. The calculator applies a standard discount (around 35%) to show you how much you could save just by committing.

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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is a cloud cost optimization calculator?

It’s a tool that estimates how much you can save on your cloud bill. By inputting your current spending and usage patterns, it identifies potential savings from strategies like right-sizing, eliminating waste, and using commitment discounts, helping you reduce your overall cloud spend.

2. How accurate is this calculator?

This tool provides a high-level estimate to help you understand your potential savings. Actual savings require a deeper analysis of your specific workloads using tools like AWS Cost Explorer or Azure Cost Management. It’s best used as a starting point to identify opportunities.

3. What does “right-sizing” really mean?

Right-sizing is the process of analyzing the performance data of your cloud resources (like CPU and RAM usage) and then selecting a smaller, cheaper instance type that still meets its performance needs. It’s about eliminating waste by paying only for what you actually use.

4. Can I really save money by deleting idle resources?

Absolutely. You are billed for every resource you provision, whether you use it or not. Deleting unattached disks, old snapshots, or unused IP addresses are “quick wins” that immediately stop ongoing charges and can add up to significant savings each month.

5. Are commitment discounts a good idea for every workload?

Commitment discounts are best for stable, predictable workloads that you know will run for at least a year, like production databases or core application servers. They are not suitable for temporary or highly fluctuating workloads, where on-demand pricing offers more flexibility.

6. Is this calculator a replacement for native cloud tools?

No, this calculator is a simplified starting point. Tools like AWS Cost Explorer or Google Cloud’s Cost Management provide highly detailed, granular data directly from your bill. Our calculator helps you frame the potential savings before you dive into those more complex tools.