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Cost Estimator

Purpose​

Storage Cost Estimator — a what-if calculator that projects cloud storage cost (AWS S3, Azure Blob, GCS) for your VM fleet and compares it against an on-premises baseline. It's a planning tool: figures come from the inputs you set, not from your actual billing or usage.

When to use it​

  • To budget or justify a move to cloud storage before you commit to it
  • To see how fleet size, average VM disk size, or snapshot retention changes projected storage spend
  • To put a number on "how much would we save vs. on-prem" for a proposal or ticket

How to get there​

  • Route / id: /cost-estimator
  • Nav: Tools → Cost Estimator (sidebar, command palette, or desktop nav)

Operate from the console (UX)​

  1. Configuration — set Number of VMs (1–1000), Average VM Size (10 GB–2 TB), and Storage Duration (1–36 months) with sliders. Toggle Include snapshots to add 50% to the total storage figure.

  2. Click Calculate Costs. The page first tries the backend (POST /api/cost/estimate); if that call fails or returns no estimates, it falls back to a client-side calculation using fixed per-GB rates (AWS S3 $0.023, Azure Blob $0.018, GCS $0.020, on-prem $0.10).

  3. Results show three provider cards (Monthly / Annual / Total for the chosen duration), with the cheapest option badged.

  4. A savings panel compares the cheapest cloud option against the on-prem estimate, with a percentage saved.

  5. A horizontal bar chart compares monthly cost across all three cloud providers plus on-prem.

  6. Copy Estimate to Clipboard copies a plain-text summary of your inputs and the results — handy for pasting into a ticket or email.

  7. Empty / fail: Check health, auth, and domain dependencies.

  8. Success: Live data loads; mutations complete without error toasts.