Developer & Tech

Storage Growth Calculator

What this does

Project data volume after months of compound growth, with added-capacity figures and optional monthly cost impact.

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Calculator inputs

How to use it

Using the storage growth calculator

  1. 01

    Measure today’s footprint

    Use provisioned or consumed GB consistently; pick consumed for honest growth rates.

  2. 02

    Estimate monthly growth

    Divide last month’s added GB by the starting total; averages smooth seasonal spikes.

  3. 03

    Add pricing (optional)

    Your blended $/GB-month turns the capacity curve into a budget curve.

Good to know

Growth compounds quietly

Five percent a month sounds modest until compounding doubles the footprint in under 15 months. Capacity planning done on linear intuition chronically under-provisions; run the compound curve before committing to hardware purchases or reserved cloud deals.

Levers beyond buying more disk

Retention policies, compression, tiering cold data to archive classes and deduplicating backups frequently cut effective growth by more than any discount negotiation. Model the reduced rate here to see the long-run effect of each policy change.

How it's calculated

The math behind this calculator

projected = current × (1 + rate)^months

Storage compounds like interest: every month adds the growth percentage on top of everything already stored, so volumes multiply by (1 + rate) each month. The cost rows apply your optional per-GB-month price to today’s and the projected footprint to expose the budget trajectory.

Assumptions & limitations

  • Constant compound monthly growth rate.
  • Cost modeled as flat $/GB-month across the whole footprint.
  • Compression, deduplication and cleanup jobs are not modeled.

Worked example

A 500 GB dataset growing 5% per month reaches about 897.9 GB after a year; nearly doubling, with monthly cost climbing from $10.00 to about $17.96 at $0.02/GB-month.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Should I enter provisioned or used capacity?
Used capacity gives truer growth rates; provisioned matters for cost. Enter used here and apply overhead separately.
What if growth is lumpy, not steady?
Use a trailing average rate. For step changes (a new product launch), run scenarios at different rates.
Does the cost row include egress or API charges?
No; only the flat storage rate you enter. See the S3 calculator for request and egress costs.

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