One of the best practices of the cloud is to pay for what you use. But, before you pay, you must know the resources you’ll need. If users don’t understand how pricing affects resources, AWS bills can get out of control.

For this reason, the AWS Pricing Calculator will be your primary tool for estimating the costs of EC2 instances for different scenarios.

How does this calculator work?

Apart from the simple self-guided process, the AWS Pricing Calculator has more features and benefits. First, you add the services you’ll need. Second, you customize small details to match your use case. The tool will then estimate the cost of your architecture based on how you configured it.

Four Benefits of the AWS Pricing Calculator

Here are some of the top benefits of the AWS Pricing Calculator:

1. Easily Generate Estimates for Comparisons

If you’re working at a cost center, you may want to know the exact amount of savings you receive before releasing funds. With the AWS Pricing Calculator, you can try different scenarios and compare best-case scenarios and worst-case scenarios.

In addition, you can examine various factors that influence costs, such as AWS regions, instance types, and memory. You can feed in the use cases of multiple savings plans. The result allows you to compare each project, side by side, to make data-driven decisions.

2. Deeper Visibility Into Prices

The AWS Pricing Calculator integrates with AI and machine learning to enhance transparency. It also has a database of all the factors you may need to evaluate costs and help avoid hidden fees.

Let’s say you had a higher than usual AWS bill. You have to go to the AWS Pricing Calculator and create your scenario for the specific month. AWS lets you access previous usage reports. Feed this data into the AWS Cost Calculator, and you’ll get an output of probable costs. If the costs don’t add up, you can then examine other potential issues with your infrastructure.

3. Helps Calculate Costs of Workloads Based on Your Cloud

Another unique benefit is the share group feature. The AWS Pricing Calculator uses share groups to estimate costs for each cluster. You can cluster by cost centers, users, or product lines.

Let’s say you want to experiment with different AWS architectures. There are several ways you can set up your cloud. AWS’ Pricing Calculator will give you approximate prices depending on how you set up the cloud. You can also combine individual estimates of each distinct process and combine them into one estimate.

4. Reporting and Discussion

The AWS Pricing Calculator lets you share cost reports with stakeholders for approval. With this handy tool, you can be confident that the estimates will be accurate. This will save you from underestimating or overestimating fund allocation.

You can export AWS costs in a .csv file and share the file offline with peers. You can share an estimate link on a public server where large groups of people can see it. You can also share links on your favorite platform, but you have to keep updating shared links to reflect the latest estimates.

The Bottom Line

Regardless, the AWS Pricing Calculator has limitations. For example, the tool cannot integrate real-life factors that affect the cost of your AWS bill.

nOps’ Pricing Calculator is a more effective tool for real-life cost-saving estimates. nOps uses real-life data, such as a company’s size and the number of employees, to help you estimate cost savings. nOps’ Pricing Calculator has everything you need to make the right pricing decisions.

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