Cloud storage is cheap and gets cheaper every day. In January, AWS announced yet another price cut (its 51st to be exact) for select instances. Google hit back criticizing the cut, however even with the January price cuts, Google Cloud Platform is between 15-41 percent less expensive than AWS across several comparable instance types.

That’s great news for anyone storing data in the cloud, but what we must consider is the additional fees associated with cloud storage. Today we are focusing on the cost of moving data. We went to AWS, Azure and Google to look at their data transfer costs (screen shots and links below).

Caption: See pricing details at AWS.

Caption: See pricing details at Azure.

Caption: See pricing details at Google.

Back of an Envelope Calculation

We did a quick back of an envelope calculation on this. If you had 100,000 clients, receiving 5, 30 byte messages per second, you are looking at $3,227 per month.

100k clients
5 messages/s
30 byte messages

Cost = 100000 clients* 5 messages * 30 byte messages * 3600 seconds in an hour * 24 hours in a day * 30 days in a month * 0.083 Azure charges = $3,227/month or $38,724/year.

Now of course, cloud vendors are walking a fine line. They cannot charge extortionate amounts to get data out of their cloud, but they are charging something. And those costs add up. Each business is different, you might be sending 100,000 messages per day, your message size might be bigger; the point here is that if you can reduce the amount of message size being sent, you can reduce your operating costs. And as businesses continuously look to reduce costs, this could be a cost saving opportunity.

This is of course an example of cloud vendors, distributing data to and from mobile devices is a whole different story – one that is more expensive.

Optimize Your Data

We believe you should optimize your data so it is delivered as efficiently as possible. Our real-time messaging solution, Diffusion Cloud, implements a unique data optimization mechanism that intelligently sends only binary deltas. Amongst the many benefits is the ability to reduce data transmission costs.

The best bit? You can try Diffusion Cloud for free and our unmatched data-centric pricing puts you in control of cost. You’ll be able to see quickly how Diffusion Cloud can help you send less data and deliver better performance at scale.