Bandwidth Cost Calculator
Estimate what outbound data transfer costs you each month.
What you provide
Result
$171.00 a month at 2,000 GB out
Egress is billed on what leaves the provider's network, so the figure that matters is not what your users download but what your origin sends. Cache hits served by a CDN usually are not charged at origin rates, retries and range requests are charged twice, and traffic between regions inside the same provider is often billed as if it went to the public internet. Read the meter, not the estimate: this arithmetic is only as good as the 2,000 GB you put into it.
- Outbound transfer
- 2,000 GB
- Covered by allowance
- 100 GB
- Billable
- 1,900 GB
- This month
- $171.00
- Twelve monthsFlat traffic
- $2,052
- Effective rateAcross all traffic, including the free allowance
- $0.09 / GB
What this cannot tell you
- Arithmetic on the numbers you enter. It does not read any provider price list and it is not connected to your account or your bill.
- Providers meter egress differently. Inter-region traffic, load balancer processing and request charges are often billed separately from the per-GB rate, so a real invoice usually has more lines on it than this.
Take this with you
How this calculation works
Outbound transfer is billed on what leaves the provider network, so the calculation subtracts your free allowance from the monthly total and prices what is left. Setting a growth rate compounds the traffic month by month and totals the twelve monthly bills separately, which matters because a flat multiplication by twelve understates a growing service badly. The effective rate at the bottom spreads the bill across all your traffic, including the part covered by the allowance.
What the results mean
- Billable
- Transfer beyond the free allowance. This is the only part that costs anything, which is why a service just above its allowance can see the bill swing wildly month to month.
- Effective rate
- The monthly bill divided by all outbound traffic. Useful for comparing providers whose allowances and headline rates differ.
- Month 12 alone
- Shown when growth is set. The last month of a growing year, which is the figure to budget the following year against.
Common problems and fixes
- The real invoice is much higher than the estimate
- Look for traffic you did not count. Retries and range requests are billed each time, health checks from monitoring services add up at scale, and traffic between availability zones or regions is often charged at close to internet rates. Object storage also bills per request, which dominates the bill for workloads made of many small files.
- I do not know how many GB we send
- Take it from the provider console rather than from your own analytics, since the two count different things. Billing counts bytes on the wire including protocol overhead and retries; analytics counts page views. If you have neither, multiply average page weight by monthly page views and add roughly 15%.
Frequently asked questions
Does a CDN reduce this bill?
Usually, and sometimes dramatically. A CDN serves cached responses from its own edge, so your origin only pays for cache misses and revalidation. The saving depends entirely on the cache hit ratio, which depends on how your cache headers are set. Static assets with long max-age values approach a very high hit ratio; personalised HTML often approaches none.
Is inbound traffic charged too?
Most major providers do not charge for inbound transfer to the same region. That asymmetry is deliberate and it is worth understanding before designing anything that moves large volumes back out.
What counts as a GB here?
A decimal gigabyte, meaning 1,000,000,000 bytes, because that is how transfer is billed. Do not compare it directly against a figure your operating system reports, since those are usually binary gibibytes labelled as GB and about 7% smaller.
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