PricingNest

Storage Costs & Pricing (Cost per GB-Month)

How to model storage costs, request costs, and a margin-safe price.

Quick checklist

  • Separate GB-month storage cost from request costs.
  • Use blended cost per GB-month across regions and classes.
  • Model at least two scenarios (p50 vs p90 usage).
  • Use a base fee if fixed overhead is meaningful.
  • Publish example bills for typical workloads.

Step-by-step

  1. Estimate blended cost per GB-month from your storage mix.
  2. Add request costs based on monthly operation volume.
  3. Add fixed overhead you need to recover.
  4. Pick a target gross margin range.
  5. Validate outputs with CSV exports and shareable links.

Example scenarios

  • Archive storage: high GB-month, low requests.
  • Read-heavy product: moderate GB-month, high request volume.
  • Premium storage: higher cost per GB-month with encryption or replication.

Common mistakes

  • Ignoring request costs when they are material.
  • Using peak storage instead of average GB-month.
  • Hiding storage unit definitions in docs.

Tools to use