Bandwidth Cost Calculator
Estimate monthly bandwidth/CDN cost from traffic and unit price.
In hosting, cloud and CDN bills, bandwidth (data transfer) is the line item that grows fastest as traffic rises. This bandwidth cost calculator lets you enter your monthly traffic directly, or derive total transfer from an average page size and monthly page views, then multiplies it by a per-GB price to show monthly and yearly cost at a glance.
Use it to budget infrastructure for a new service, to compare how much image and video optimization cuts your transfer cost, or to quote CDN versus direct hosting transfer fees. All calculations run entirely in your browser and your inputs are never sent anywhere.
| Total transfer (GB) | 500 |
|---|---|
| Monthly cost | 45.00 |
| Yearly cost | 540.00 |
Two input modes
If you already know your transfer volume, use (A) Monthly traffic and enter it in GB or TB. For a new service without traffic stats yet, (B) Page size × page views is handier: enter your average page weight (bytes transferred) and expected monthly page views to estimate total transfer.
- Conversions use binary units: 1 TB = 1024 GB, 1 MB = 1024 KB.
- Total transfer = average page size (GB) × monthly page views
- Monthly cost = total transfer (GB) × price per GB; yearly cost = monthly × 12
How to reduce transfer
Bandwidth cost is ultimately the number of bytes you ship. For the same traffic, these optimizations cut transfer significantly.
- Image optimization: switching to WebP/AVIF and resizing properly can halve image weight or more.
- Compression: using Brotli instead of Gzip further shrinks text assets (HTML/CSS/JS). Confirm it is actually active with the compression check.
- Cache headers: a long
Cache-Controlmax-age on static assets drops repeat-visit transfer to zero. - CDN: a higher edge cache hit ratio reduces origin transfer, and CDN per-GB pricing is often cheaper than direct egress.
- Lazy loading: deferring off-screen images and video avoids shipping bytes nobody consumes.
Estimation caveats
Provider pricing usually has a free tier followed by tiered rates, and the per-GB price varies by region. This calculator uses a single flat rate, so it may not match your bill exactly. Also budget headroom for traffic spikes from launches or viral events.
Typical egress prices per GB (reference)
The single number you enter as "price per GB" varies enormously by provider and by whether traffic exits through a CDN. These are commonly published list rates (first tier, US region, USD) to sanity-check your input — always confirm against your provider's current pricing page.
| Provider / type | Free tier / month | Per-GB after free |
|---|---|---|
| AWS EC2/S3 egress (direct) | 100 GB | ~$0.09 |
| Google Cloud egress (direct) | 0–200 GB | ~$0.085–0.12 |
| Azure egress (direct) | 100 GB | ~$0.087 |
| Amazon CloudFront (CDN) | 1 TB | ~$0.085 |
| Cloudflare / bunny.net (CDN) | varies | $0–0.01 |
| DigitalOcean / Vultr / Linode | 1–5 TB pooled | ~$0.01 |
Worked example
Say your average page weight is 2 MB (bytes transferred) and you expect 500,000page views per month. Total transfer = 2 MB × 500,000 = 1,000,000 MB = 976.6 GB(since 1 GB = 1024 MB, not 1000). At AWS's $0.09/GB with the first 100 GB free, you pay for876.6 GB → about $78.9/month (~$947/year). Move the same traffic behind a CDN at $0.01/GB and it drops to roughly $8.8/month— an order of magnitude cheaper, which is why egress pricing, not raw volume, usually dominates the decision.
Common pitfall
The biggest mistake is plugging in the uncompressedor DevTools "Resources" size as your page weight. You are billed for bytes that actually leave the server — the compressed (Brotli/Gzip) "Transferred" figure, not the larger "Size" column. A second trap: assuming a flat rate when most clouds charge $0for the first 100 GB–1 TB, so small sites near the free tier pay far less than a naive volume × rate calculation suggests.