Requests vs compute
Short, light functions are request-bound, long or memory-heavy ones flip to compute-bound.
Home / Dev & AI / Cloud Cost / Serverless Cost Calculator
Cloud Cost
Serverless Cost Calculator
Estimate serverless cost on any platform. Enter invocations, duration and memory, set the request and compute rates for AWS, GCP, Azure or Cloudflare, and see the monthly bill.
Estimated monthly cost
$0
Request cost—
Compute cost (GB-seconds)—
GB-seconds used—
Cost per 1M invocations—
Annual estimate—
Cost as invocations grow
Projected monthly spend at 2x, 5x and 10x volume.
What the Serverless Cost Calculator does
Serverless, or function as a service, lets you run code without provisioning servers and pay only for what executes. Every major platform, AWS Lambda, Google Cloud Functions, Azure Functions and Cloudflare Workers, bills on the same two axes: the number of invocations and compute measured in GB-seconds, which is memory allocated times run time.
This serverless cost calculator is provider neutral. Set the request price and compute price to match whichever platform you use, enter your invocations, duration and memory, and it computes GB-seconds and the total. That makes it easy to compare platforms on the same workload and see which is cheapest for your traffic.
Heads up on pricing. The rates built into this tool are public list estimates for July 2026 and can change without notice. Providers also offer batch discounts, prompt caching and volume tiers that lower real costs, so treat the output as a planning estimate, not a quote.
The formula
GB-seconds = invocations × (duration ÷ 1000) × (memory ÷ 1024)
cost = (invocations ÷ 1M × request price) + (GB-seconds × compute price)
cost = (invocations ÷ 1M × request price) + (GB-seconds × compute price)
Worked example
For 10,000,000 invocations at 200 ms and 512 MB, GB-seconds is 10,000,000 × 0.2 × 0.5 = 1,000,000. At $0.20 per million requests and $0.0000166667 per GB-second, that is $2 + $16.67 = about $18.67 a month before any free tier.
Ways to lower your cloud costs
- Right size resources. Pick the smallest instance, memory or capacity that still meets your performance target.
- Commit to steady load. Reserved instances, savings plans and committed use discounts cut rates sharply for predictable workloads.
- Use serverless for spiky traffic. Scale-to-zero services mean you pay nothing while there are no requests.
- Tier cold storage. Move rarely accessed data to cheaper classes such as Glacier, Coldline or Archive.
- Cut data transfer. A CDN and keeping traffic within a single region reduce the egress charges that quietly grow with scale.
Frequently asked questions
How is serverless priced?
By invocations plus compute in GB-seconds, which is memory times duration. Rates differ by provider, so set them above to match your platform.
Which serverless platform is cheapest?
It depends on your invocation count, duration and memory. Cloudflare Workers is cheap for short requests, while Lambda and Cloud Functions suit heavier compute. Compare on the same numbers.
What is a GB-second?
One gigabyte of memory allocated for one second of execution. It is the standard unit of serverless compute billing across providers.
When is serverless not cost effective?
For steady, high volume workloads that keep functions busy around the clock, always-on containers or VMs are often cheaper per request.
Are these rates current?
The defaults are July 2026 AWS style estimates. Adjust them to your provider and confirm on their pricing page.