how cloud storage costs vary with usage

Some numbers which we crunched:

Azure blob storage, 1 TB:

Storage cost = $24 per month (for 1 TB - I suppose they will reach 1 TB only after a year or so.)

Data write cost probably negligible, $0.065 per 10,000 operations.

Data read cost = $0.005 per 10,000 operations.

Assuming 10k requests per day, that would be
$0.005*30 = $0.15 per month. 

10k requests/day =  10,000 * (10 MB) * (30 days) / month = 3 TB.

Assuming 10k requests per hour (maybe if they scale up a lot), that would be
$0.005*30*24 = $3.6 per month.

So total cost less than $30 per month estimated. 

Assuming average file size of 10 MB,

10k requests/hour =  10,000 * (10 MB) * 24 * (30 days) / month = 72 TB.

But what is missed out here is data transfer cost.

First 100 GB/month is free. But after that, $0.12 per GB. That would make the 3 TB data transfer cost = $360. (actually for 3.1 TB, counting the 100 GB free).

1.1 TB transfer = $120. If we set a data transfer budget of $60, ie. $2 per day, we would get 600 GB of transfer. 

AWS S3 object storage:

Pricing is similar - storage is cheap, but bandwidth is expensive. Using the calculator at https://calculator.aws/#/estimate

1 TB of data (assuming 15 MB average size, 64k objects) = $25 per month

10k put requests, 200k get requests, all less than a dollar.

Bandwidth, 10 TB = $1,120. So, for $60 data transfer budget, we get 535 GB of transfer. 

Dedicated server:

If a dedicated server is used, usually 10 TB of transfer is included in the monthly price of around Rs. 10k or $120.