Log Storage Cost Per Day Calculator
Estimate the daily and monthly cost of log ingestion and retention from your log volume, retention window and per-GB pricing.
How it works
Ingest/day = GB/day × ingest price · Steady-state stored = GB/day × retention days · Storage/day = stored × storage price ÷ 30 · Total/day = ingest + storage
Log platforms bill in two parts: a one-time ingest charge per gigabyte as data arrives, and an ongoing storage charge for as long as you retain it. Ingest is usually the dominant cost because its per-GB price is far higher than storage. At steady state you are always holding roughly one retention window of data, so a longer window raises storage linearly while ingest stays fixed to your daily volume.
Worked example
At 20 GB/day, ingest is 20 × $0.50 = $10/day. Holding 30 days means 600 GB stored; at $0.03/GB-month that is 600 × 0.03 ÷ 30 = $0.60/day. Total ≈ $10.60/day, about $318/month.
Frequently asked questions
Why is ingest usually more expensive than storage?
Ingest pricing covers parsing, indexing and making logs searchable, which is compute-heavy, whereas storage is just holding compressed bytes. That is why cutting log volume at the source saves far more than shortening retention.
How do I lower log costs?
Sample or drop noisy debug logs before ingest, route rarely queried logs to cheap archive storage, shorten retention on high-volume streams, and avoid logging large payloads or duplicate fields.
What does "steady state" mean here?
Once your pipeline has been running longer than the retention window, the amount stored stops growing — each new day of logs replaces the oldest day that ages out. Stored volume then holds at roughly daily volume times retention days.
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This calculator is for educational purposes. Double-check important results before acting on them.