Cloud TCO Calculator
Compare total cost of ownership across on-premises, single cloud, and multi-cloud over a 3-year horizon. Adjust inputs in real time and see the financial case for cloud migration instantly.
About This Calculator
Cloud migration decisions are often made on incomplete financial data. This calculator models the true total cost of ownership — including hardware amortization, staffing, data center overhead, migration costs, and cloud growth — across three deployment models over three years.
How to use it: Enter your current on-premises costs and your estimated cloud costs using the sliders below. The chart and summary update in real time. The multi-cloud estimate applies an 18% complexity premium over single-cloud costs, reflecting typical operational overhead.
On-Premises Costs
💡 Include all servers in scope for this workload.
💡 Amortized over 5 years.
💡 Colocation, power, cooling, floor space.
💡 Fully-loaded cost of staff managing this infrastructure.
💡 Typically 15–22% of hardware cost per year.
Cloud Costs
💡 VMs, containers, serverless — estimated monthly.
💡 Object, block, and file storage combined.
💡 Data transfer, CDN, load balancers.
💡 Cloud engineers, FinOps, security — fully loaded.
💡 Workload growth, new services. Typically 10–25%.
3-Year TCO Comparison
Year-by-Year Breakdown
| Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | 3-Year Total | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🏢 On-Premises | $572K | $572K | $572K | $1.7M |
| ☁️ Single Cloud | $550K | $506K | $582K | $1.6M |
| 🌐 Multi-Cloud | $649K | $597K | $687K | $1.9M |
* Year 1 cloud cost includes a one-time migration estimate of $110K (25% of Year 1 cloud run cost). Multi-cloud includes an 18% complexity premium over single cloud.
Get Your TCO Report
Receive a formatted report with your cost comparison, savings estimate, and cloud migration recommendation.
How to Interpret Your Results
How the Cloud TCO Calculator works
You set 10 sliders. 5 cover on-premises costs: number of physical servers, average server hardware cost, annual data center cost, annual infrastructure staff cost, and annual maintenance and support as a percent of hardware cost. 5 cover cloud costs: monthly compute, monthly storage, monthly network and egress, annual cloud operations staff cost, and expected annual cloud cost growth.
Annual on-premises cost is hardware amortized over 5 years, plus maintenance at your percent of total hardware cost, plus data center and staff costs. The tool holds this figure flat for all 3 years.
Annual cloud cost is the 3 monthly costs times 12, plus cloud staff. It rises each year by your growth rate. Year 1 adds a one-time migration cost set at 25% of the Year 1 cloud run cost. Multi-cloud is single cloud plus an 18% complexity premium.
Reading your results
3 cards show the 3-year TCO for on-premises, single cloud and multi-cloud. The cheaper of on-premises and single cloud is labeled LOWEST COST. Multi-cloud always costs 18% more than single cloud in this model, so it never takes that label.
A bar chart and a table show each option's cost for Years 1, 2 and 3.
If single cloud costs less than on-premises over 3 years, a callout shows the 3-year savings and the migration cost included in Year 1. If not, the tool says cloud is not the lower-cost option with your inputs. It suggests right-sizing, reserved instances, or rechecking your on-premises assumptions.
The model does not cover shadow IT, software licensing changes, or productivity gains from cloud-native services.
Want an AI co-pilot to interpret the result and advise on next steps?