Maybe you can create a Google sheet so we can experiment with it a bit?
Basics [...]
I've never really used S3 and don't know about cost per transaction, maybe you can share a link for that pricing information?
There should be some distinction for business vs individual plans. Although individuals can sometimes just sign up as business customers, it doesn't work the other way around.
I think we should also add an option for how many months the storage is needed.
Many providers offer a discount for when you pay annualy. pCloud even has a lifetime offer.
Some providers charge in chunks like you can get 1TB, 5TB, 20TB plans. How should we compare these to the providers that charge per byte?
The calculator should probably choose the cheapest plan that can accommodate the data required.
What about currencies? Some providers only charge in $ or EUR, some will charge in any currency. Maybe keep the native currency and convert using a current exchange rate?
Yeah, for now I'd try to keep it simple and use a fixed exchange rate.
Some providers have their own conversions (i.e. Dropbox doesn't care whether you're paying in € or $, the price is the same for individuals).
How do you see the UI working? The calculators I've seen you put in how many TB you want to store and how many GB you want to upload and download each month. That would work out OK. For the tiered providers we could pick a tier which would accommodate that amount of TB.
The Backblaze B2 calculator (backblaze DOT com/b2/cloud-storage-pricing.html) has an option to select how much data you delete each month, and its accumulating the upload over time.
I'm not sure if that's something we want?
If we do want that, I'm not sure how to handle the plan selection for tiered providers: if we have 1000GB stored, and upload and delete 100GB/mo - should the plan allow for 1000GB or for 1100GB?
Additionally, if we allow for upload/deletions accumulating over time, then we have to consider, that a user might want to switch to allow for more or less data, to save costs.
So far I see a user providing the following information:
- Currency
- Months the storage is needed for
- Initial Upload (GiB)
- Upload/mo (GiB)
- Deleted/mo (GiB)
- Download/mo (GiB)
- Business (yes/no)
Maybe the upload/deleted/download could be used as an indicator for how much storage is hot vs. cold?
Some dropdowns for expected use to help set the parameters might be interesting, eg daily backup, video streaming, long term archive, other... So daily backup of 5TB of data - we can then estimate upload / download / transactions which nobody has a clue what to put in!
That sounds good, but I'd probably keep it simple for now.
Things to watch out for - are the providers quoting per GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes or GiB = 1,073,741,824 bytes? For example s3 use GiB whereas b2 uses GB (reasonably sure about this).
Yeah that's a problem.
I think whatever we do it will never be totally accurate, however we can get feedback of real world usage from rclone users which could help estimate the actual bills which will make it more accurate than most calculators when users just put in random data!
Definitely!