How to Use This Tool
Enter the RAM and vCPUs your application needs at steady state — not your absolute peak, since most cloud platforms let you resize or auto-scale beyond a baseline instance. Add your expected storage footprint in gigabytes, covering your OS disk plus any attached data volumes. The tool then searches a general-purpose instance catalog for each provider and returns the smallest instance that meets or exceeds both your RAM and vCPU targets, since over-provisioning either one usually means paying for capacity you won't use.
Compute cost is calculated from each matched instance's hourly on-demand rate multiplied by an average of 730 hours per month. Storage cost applies each provider's approximate per-gigabyte monthly rate for standard SSD-backed storage. The two are added together into a total monthly estimate, with the cheapest option highlighted so you can compare at a glance.
Why Cloud Pricing Is So Hard to Compare
AWS, GCP, and Azure all price compute by the instance, but their instance families, discount structures, and included extras rarely line up cleanly. A “large” instance on one provider might include more baseline network bandwidth than another, and reserved or committed-use discounts can cut on-demand pricing by 30-60% if you're willing to commit for a year or more — something a quick estimate like this one won't capture.
- On-demand pricing (used here) is the most flexible but also the most expensive per hour — a fair baseline for comparing raw sticker prices.
- Reserved / committed-use pricing can meaningfully undercut on-demand rates in exchange for a 1-3 year commitment.
- Storage pricing often has multiple tiers (standard vs. premium vs. archive) — this estimate uses a general-purpose SSD tier as a reasonable middle ground.
Use this estimate to shortlist a provider and instance family quickly, then confirm exact numbers with each provider's official pricing calculator before committing budget — regional pricing, egress bandwidth, and support tiers can all shift the final number. If your traffic estimate also needs a bandwidth figure to plug in elsewhere, our Bandwidth & RAM Calculator is a natural next stop.