Cloud Storage Class Calculator
Compare Standard, Nearline, Coldline and Archive on your real access pattern — with Class A and B operations, retrieval fees and the early-delete charge all counted. Archive costs 125x more per read than Standard, which flips the answer more often than people expect.
Every class, fully charged
| Class | Storage | Class A | Class B | Retrieval | Early delete | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $400.00 | $0.30 | $0.16 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $400.46 |
| Nearline30-day minimum | $200.00 | $0.60 | $0.40 | $6.00 | $0.00 | $207.00 |
| Coldline90-day minimum | $80.00 | $1.20 | $4.00 | $12.00 | $0.00 | $97.20 |
| Archive365-day minimum | $24.00 | $3.00 | $20.00 | $30.00 | $0.00 | $77.00 |
20K GiB stored · 19–19 kWh a month at 430 gCO2eq/kWh (us-central1). That is about 5 tree-years of sequestration.
An estimate from open coefficients, shown as a range because the underlying research is a range. Your provider’s own carbon tool is the authoritative figure — this exists to price a change at the moment you are deciding it, which theirs cannot do. Methodology and sources.
What this model assumes
- Rates are us-central1 (Iowa) regional (single-region) storage with a flat namespace, list price, before any committed-use or negotiated discount.
- Google publishes storage rates per gibibyte-hour; these are converted at 730 hours per month, which reproduces the published monthly figure exactly ($0.000027397 × 730 = $0.020 for Standard).
- Class A operations are writes and lists; Class B are reads. Both are charged per object, so mean object size drives the count. Dual-region and multi-region buckets cost more and are not modelled.
- The early-delete charge assumes objects turn over at the lifetime you entered and the whole dataset behaves the same way. A bucket with mixed lifetimes will sit somewhere between this and zero.
- Autoclass, soft-delete retention, Rapid storage and inter-region replication are not modelled. Each adds cost; none changes which class wins.
- Cloud Storage classes, operations and retrieval — source, read 4 Aug 2026
US East (N. Virginia) list prices, excluding any negotiated or committed-use discount. Your effective rate is lower if you have one.
Frequently asked questions
Is Archive storage always cheaper on Google Cloud?
No, and it is less often cheaper than the per-gigabyte rates suggest. Archive stores data at $0.0012 per GiB-month against Standard's $0.020 — sixteen times less — but its Class B (read) operations cost $0.05 per thousand against Standard's $0.0004, which is 125 times more. Any workload that reads its data with even moderate frequency pays back the storage saving in operation charges. This is the main way Cloud Storage differs from S3, where the operation rates across classes are far closer together.
What is the difference between Class A and Class B operations?
Class A operations write or list — inserts, updates, copies, bucket and object listings. Class B operations read — object gets and metadata reads. Class A is always the more expensive of the two within a class. Both are charged per operation rather than per byte, so mean object size drives the bill: a terabyte held as a million small objects costs far more to access than the same terabyte in a thousand large ones.
How does the Cloud Storage minimum duration charge work?
Nearline requires 30 days, Coldline 90 and Archive 365. Delete or re-tier an object before its minimum elapses and Google bills the remaining days at that class's rate anyway. On data that turns over quickly the charge compounds: objects living 10 days in a 90-day class pay for 80 unused days every 10 days, which is eight times the nominal storage cost.
Does this include multi-region and dual-region storage?
No. Every rate here is single-region (regional) storage in us-central1, which is the cheapest and the most common. Dual-region and multi-region buckets cost roughly 50% and 80% more per gigabyte respectively, and their operation rates differ too. The class that wins rarely changes when you move between location types, but the absolute figures do.
Should I use Autoclass instead of choosing a class?
Autoclass moves objects between classes based on access, which removes the guesswork and the early-delete risk, and it charges a management fee per object. It is usually the right answer for buckets with genuinely unpredictable access patterns and the wrong answer for buckets whose pattern you already know — which is what this calculator is for. Autoclass is not modelled here.
Knowing the right class is easy. Finding the buckets is not.
Finitizer reads your Cloud Storage inventory and access logs, works out each bucket's real read pattern and object-size distribution, and flags the ones whose lifecycle rule is costing more in operations than it saves in storage.