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Show HN: A simple storage pricing calculator for AWS
- QuinnyPig 7y agoAWS 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 7y ago> 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 7y agohttps://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.
- cvaidya1986 7y agoExcellent design :)
- QuinnyPig 7y agoThanks! It didn't fall flatypus.
- sokoloff 7y agoThe 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 7y agoYou 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 7y ago...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.
- cure 7y agoEverything is relative: compared to Azure virtual machine family naming, AWS is not so bad!
- sokoloff 7y agoMaybe related: Reduced Redundancy is showing as more expensive than Standard (for same 50G/US-East sample data)
- QuinnyPig 7y agoThat’s a real pricing facet! See https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-reduced-redundancy-storage-is-dead/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/s3-reduced-redundancy-sto...
- speedgoose 7y agoDid 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 7y agoYes, 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 7y agoRelated: 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
- xhkkffbf 7y agoThis is nice, but is it the price per month? Per year?
- pavelevst 7y agoWould be nice to see other cloud providers for comparison
- QuinnyPig 7y agoGenerally 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.
- bscanlan 7y agoIt's clearly missing storing data uuencoded in Route53 TXT records.
- scarface74 7y agoOr you can get 75GB free by using Lambda.... https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/how-to-get-75-gigs-of-free-storage-in-aws-with-xssfox/ https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud... (Yes this is a joke)
- jedberg 7y agoIt'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 7y agoI'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.
- scarface74 7y agoAWS already offers a free key value store - SSM Parameter Store. It’s severely rate limited if you don’t pay for it - but it’s still cheap.
- renewiltord 7y agoGlacier 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.
- QuinnyPig 7y agoI have no earthly idea, personally.
- txcwpalpha 7y agoThis 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 7y agoYeah, 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.
- bluntfang 7y agois this just an ad?
- _air 7y agoThe mindblown graphic that comes up when you enter a rather large data size is delightful :)
- sl1ck731 7y agoI 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 7y ago>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.
- kaydub 7y agoIf 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 7y agoThe 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.
- three_seagrass 7y ago
- EnigmaticProg 7y agoThis list doesn't showcase FSx[0] as an option. --- [0] https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/ https://aws.amazon.com/fsx/
- sciurus 7y agoThis is neat. https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calculator/?storage=1000&units=10®ion=useast1&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calcu... is a way to show "how much more expensive is X than S3"?
- axegon_ 7y agoGiven 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)_/¯
- scrollaway 7y ago> my usage was 99.2% identical What does that mean? If you're talking about S3, things like PUTs are way more expensive than GETs for example (by two magnitudes). So your usage can be "nearly identical", you can still spend money on precious GETs. Example: Last month I spent around 300 EUR on food. The month before, I spent 150 EUR, yet my food was "97% identical", the 3% being those two times I ordered 75 EUR of sushi takeout. PS: A lot of people get frustrated/confused by AWS pricing and, fair enough, but for a lot of businesses it's often a feature that they allow developers to architect their applications with costs in mind. It's a knife that cuts three different ways.
- axegon_ 7y agoYeah, I know how that works. And no, none of that. In my case it was renting a GPU for training a model. No put traffic involved in either of the cases, the data was in a s3 prior to that. It was simply tweaking hyperparameters in the code, nothing more. On both occasions it took the exact same time, exact same to train, exact same resources. There were apparently no changes to the pricing but still. I'm referring to aws's quantum bills as a whole. Never had such issues with gcp... Yet...
- enitihas 7y agoDoes cost explorer show no difference in your top costs?
- 7y ago
- res0nat0r 7y agoThis 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?
- ceocoder 7y ago`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
- johnchristopher 7y agoNewbie 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 ?
- tracker1 7y agoThere are FUSE adapters to mount S3 and similar services... some have various caching options, and ymmv a lot. I would test your latency from your VPS to the various S3, Azure etc locations... May also want to consider Digital Ocean's storage which is API compatible to S3.
- DelightOne 7y ago> May also want to consider Digital Ocean's storage which is API compatible to S3. Don't forget to rclone to second provider though.
- txcwpalpha 7y agoIf 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kaydub 7y ago$4/mo, not $40/mo
- txcwpalpha 7y agoLol yep, thanks. Fixed. I think I was an order of magnitude off because the parent comment was stating his costs in years. D'oh.
- BurningFrog 7y agoSo my cost is $69. But it doesn't say per what! I assume it's per month, but it really should say.
- tracker1 7y agoNot being in a position where I'm billed for storage (work does that), I didn't really know either. Guessing per month as well.
- myroon5 7y agoIt's back up in the top right: "Your monthly payment will be:"
- BurningFrog 7y agoNot on the page I get: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calculator/?storage=3&units=20®ion=uswest2&submitButton=Compare+Storage+Costs https://www.duckbillgroup.com/aws-super-simple-storage-calcu...
- myroon5 7y agobit odd but only visible after selecting options for both: "Where is your data currently?" "Which tier are you using?"
- megous 7y agoI was also wondering, and my initial guess was per year. Otherwise I can buy myself a 2TB HDD for the cost of 1-2 months of cheapest equvalent storage at AWS. Sounds like a gold mine for Amazon at any rate.
- zceee12 7y agoS3 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.
- kondro 7y agoThis is cool, but the EFS infrequent access pricing for Australia looks wrong. Shouldn't 100GB cost $2.72 (not $1.20)?
- hendry 7y agoWhat... "Standard - Infrequent Access" & "One Zone - Infrequent Access" is cheaper than Glacier Deep Archive?? 5TB in ap-southeast-1 is what I plugged in.
- ignoramous 7y agoEither 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/
- jgalt212 7y agoWith 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mike_aarons 7y agoThe mindblown platypus when you enter a high petabyte value is cute. I like it :)
- ernsheong 7y ago1TB in GCP Cloud Storage's Archive storage class is just $1.20 per month. https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=8404213d-ef9e-4b1a-b5ce-541631c1345c https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=8404213d-ef... Retrieval is within seconds, not hours like in Glacier.
- rob-olmos 7y agoImpressive to me but $50 to retrieve 1TB vs cheaper tiers on AWS for slower. I don't know what GCP's retrieval throughput is though.
- anakaiti 7y agoThere's also B2, with 5$/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
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- eigen-vector 7y agoDisclaimer: I work for AWS. A counter point to think about. Archival storage needs to inform engineering behavior as well. If I'm archiving something knowing that retrieval will take longer or is expensive, I will make smart decisions about what I should be archiving. If I archive knowing that retrieval is in seconds, I'm probably dumping everything in the archive. I don't know how popular GCP's archival storage is, but when it grows and customers start using it simply as a cheaper hot storage (because it is fast and cheap), they'll have to rethink their pricing.
- based2 7y ago0 for dynamodb ?
- xcavier 7y agoThe fact that a 3rd party feels the need to publish a calculator suggests it is not ‘simple’