Monthly Cloud Cost Breakdown
Structure compute, storage, bandwidth, and fixed overhead into a clear monthly cloud cost model.
Quick checklist
- Split costs into compute, storage, bandwidth, and other.
- Keep fixed overhead separate from variable usage costs.
- Use one consistent currency and time window.
- Reconcile totals with billing exports monthly.
Cost categories
- Compute: vCPU-hours, memory GB-hours, managed compute services.
- Storage: GB-month, request fees, snapshots, backups.
- Bandwidth: egress, CDN, inter-region traffic.
- Other: monitoring, support, observability, vendor APIs.
- Fixed overhead: baseline support, on-call, platform ops.
Step-by-step
- Pull the last billing month and map line items to categories.
- Compute each variable cost bucket separately.
- Add fixed overhead to produce total monthly cloud cost.
- Compare totals to the previous month for anomalies.
- Allocate cost to products or plans if needed.
Benchmarks
- Cloud COGS often run 10-30% of revenue for efficient SaaS.
- If bandwidth cost is rising faster than revenue, review caching.
- If storage cost is rising faster than usage, review retention policies.
Common mistakes
- Mixing one-time migrations with steady-state costs.
- Double counting storage requests inside compute costs.
- Ignoring egress in multi-region architectures.
- Using list price rather than blended, discounted rates.
