Cloud Costs
Cloud Egress Billing: The Cost No One Calculates Until the Invoice Arrives
Why data transfer remains invisible during design reviews and how that omission compounds into budget drift.
Read →Cloud infrastructure tools
Size it right. Before the invoice arrives.
VM sizing, egress cost estimator, and database connection pool calculator for cloud-native workloads.
Size your VM
Estimate egress cost
⭐ 4.7/5 from 312 users
Sample workload
Suggested shape
vCPU: 4 / RAM: 8 GB
Web tier
Monthly estimate
$68.40
USD
Savings vs. over-provisioned: 47%
Built for quick FinOps reviews before architecture meetings, procurement approvals, or migration planning.
Tool 1
VM / Instance Sizing Calculator
Provider-agnostic guidance based on observed utilisation and conservative headroom.
Recommended vCPU count
Recommended RAM
Suggested instance class
Estimated savings vs. current
How it works
Three checks before you resize
1
Enter current CPU and RAM utilisation figures.
Use peak usage rather than idle averages. That keeps the recommendation grounded in production traffic, not overnight quiet periods.
2
Review right-sized instance recommendation.
The calculator targets 70–80% utilisation for sustained workloads and lower thresholds for bursty services.
3
Estimate monthly egress cost by provider and destination.
Cost visibility matters because infrastructure choices fail when network charges are treated as an afterthought.
From the blog
Practical notes for FinOps and platform teams
Instance Sizing
Right-Sizing Cloud VMs: Why Most Teams Over-Provision by 40–60%
A closer look at the feedback loops teams skip when they keep paying for unused capacity.
Read →
Database Scaling
Database Connection Pooling: The Invisible Bottleneck at Scale
Connection limits fail quietly until latency rises, worker queues fill, and errors start stacking.
Read →Operators say
Used in active infrastructure reviews
“Identified a 4× over-provisioned database server in 90 seconds.”
Daniel Shaw, Infrastructure Lead
“Egress estimator showed we were paying $1,800/month to AWS that Cloudflare R2 would have eliminated.”
Grace Kim, Platform Architect
“Replaces 30 minutes of cloud pricing page navigation.”
Scott Webb, Senior SRE
FAQ
Answers teams ask before changing production capacity
What utilisation target should I size for?
70–80% for sustained workloads; 60% for bursty and web workloads to absorb traffic spikes without throttling.
Does the VM calculator account for memory-optimised instances?
It provides general-purpose recommendations. Memory-intensive workloads such as Redis or in-memory databases may require higher RAM-to-vCPU ratios.
Why is egress free within the same AZ?
Cloud providers charge for data leaving their physical data centres. Traffic staying within an availability zone does not cross billing boundaries.
Is Cloudflare R2 really free for egress?
Yes. R2 charges for storage and operations, not egress, which changes the economics for public asset delivery and download-heavy services.
Should I use spot/preemptible instances for production?
Only for fault-tolerant or stateless workloads. Spot instances can disappear with limited notice and are poor fits for persistent databases.
How often should I re-run a sizing review?
Monthly is a reasonable baseline. Teams with fast release velocity or seasonal traffic usually benefit from checking after every major launch.