🔌 API Cost Calculator

Estimate your REST API infrastructure costs including compute servers, database, CDN, bandwidth, and monitoring. Plan your tech stack budget accurately.

📊 Infrastructure Cost Estimator
Traffic & Usage
Compute
Database & Storage
Networking
Other
📈 Monthly Cost Breakdown
Total Monthly Infrastructure Cost
Cost Distribution
Monthly vs Annual
⚠️ Estimates are approximate. Actual costs vary by provider, region, reserved vs on-demand pricing, and traffic patterns. Get quotes from AWS, GCP, and Azure for precise numbers.
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Configure your infrastructure to see cost estimates

About

API Infrastructure Cost Factors

Compute Costs

The largest cost driver. Consider auto-scaling to handle variable traffic without paying for idle capacity. Reserved instances (1-3 year commitments) save 30-70% vs on-demand. Serverless (Lambda, Cloud Run) can be more economical for low/spiky traffic.

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Database Costs

Usually the 2nd biggest expense. Read replicas improve performance but add cost. Connection pooling (PgBouncer, RDS Proxy) reduces connection overhead. Multi-region replication costs 2-3× single region. Consider caching (Redis) to reduce DB load.

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Bandwidth & CDN

Egress (outbound) bandwidth is typically charged; ingress is free. CDN reduces origin server load and latency. For APIs serving large payloads globally, CDN can reduce bandwidth costs by 50-80%. Compress responses with gzip/brotli to minimize bandwidth usage.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

Common questions about API Cost calculations

What is the cheapest way to host an API?
For low traffic: Serverless (AWS Lambda + API Gateway, Google Cloud Run) can be near-free under free tier limits. For steady traffic: reserved VMs on DigitalOcean, Hetzner, or Vultr are often 3-5× cheaper than AWS/GCP on-demand. Always compare reserved instance pricing vs on-demand for predictable workloads.
How do I reduce API hosting costs?
Key strategies: (1) Use auto-scaling to pay only for what you use; (2) Enable response compression (60-80% bandwidth savings); (3) Implement caching at CDN and application layer; (4) Use reserved instances for predictable baseline load; (5) Optimize database queries to reduce compute time; (6) Use spot/preemptible instances for batch workloads.
What is egress pricing and why does it matter?
Egress is the cost of data transferred OUT from your cloud provider to the internet. AWS, GCP, and Azure charge $0.08-0.12/GB for egress. For a high-traffic API serving 5KB average responses at 1M requests/day, that's 5GB/day = ~$0.50/day or ~$15/month just in egress. CDN can reduce this by caching responses closer to users.
Should I use serverless or traditional VMs for my API?
Use serverless when: traffic is unpredictable or spiky, you have <100K requests/day, or you want zero ops overhead. Use VMs when: traffic is steady and predictable (reserved VMs are 5-10× cheaper at scale), you need persistent connections, or have heavy background processing. For most startups, serverless until 1M+ requests/day makes economic sense.

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