Do you use the AWS Cost Calculator? This could be your most valuable business asset. It’s a great tool to help anyone start with cost optimization.

AWS has two versions of its calculator. While the simple monthly calculator works out your monthly cost estimates, the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) calculator helps you evaluate the cloud’s value. The TCO calculator lets you compare the value of the cloud over on-premises facilities. This is the initial step of minimizing operational costs.

How Does the AWS Cost Calculator Work?

A simple AWS calculation may involve the following steps:

  1. Begin by adding services, such as EC2 instances, EBS volumes, and Dedicated Hosts. Also, specify your AWS availability zone.
  2. Add more details saying if you want more vCPU availability per month.
  3. View estimated results. You can filter by each service and group.

How the Calculator Can Help Minimize Costs

The AWS Cost Calculator is an easy-to-use tool that gives a 360-degree overview of your costs. There are a variety of use cases for which you can use it. Let’s examine three:

  • Helps Choose the Cheapest Option: You can compare costs by service. Some services are expensive. Some are not. If you find that your keyed requirements yield a higher budget, you can optimize the inputs. This will let you choose the cheapest but most performing services. You can also compare various groups manually. Each group can be a combination of several parameters. Fine-tuning your inputs will lead to different outputs. Go with the cheapest group. You can also keep all other factors constant and compare costs in different AWS regions. Choose a region with the lowest data transfer costs.
  • Save When You Commit: Third-party tools can suggest the best pricing plans using AWS Cost Calculator data. Before implementing your plans on AWS, you must have a subscription. Each subscription will show you the exact capacity you’ll get and the amount you’ll pay for the resources. For example, let’s say you’re running a website and need 5GB of yearly storage. AWS may charge $113 a year to host the website. You consult another engineer who tells you that a static website uses much less space. He advises you to scale down to 3GB a year. With your input, you verify with the AWS Cost Calculator, and you just minimized web-hosting costs. This process is effective even for large-scale applications.
  • Minimize the Cost of Maintenance: Even though there are a few cloud titans, competition increases daily. As the number of competitors increases, more companies make it easy to start with the cloud. Therefore, the problem may be the cost of maintaining, managing, and running applications on the web. Using its hierarchical estimates, the AWS Cost Calculator can help you choose an option with the least maintenance costs. The calculator ranks the cost of each architecture you plan to deploy on the cloud. This helps decision-makers evaluate the best option with less future costs.

There’s one huge disadvantage of the AWS Cost Calculator, though. Like any other tool, the output depends on what you put in. You may scale in the future, making you buy more resources. However, when you start, it is difficult to know the exact services you require. You’ll need to be accurate in your estimations.

There’s a need for a more efficient tool that can give you the exact amount of savings in dollars. The nOps ROI and Cost Calculator tool doesn’t focus on operations only. It matches your AWS needs to tangible business metrics, such as ROI. Learn more about how nOps ROI and Cost Calculator helps companies minimize cloud costs.