Analysis & intelligence

Cloud cost estimation

What a system costs is a design decision, not a billing surprise. Skeema maps real cloud SKUs to every node and projects a monthly bill — so you can compare architectures on price the same way you compare them on latency.

What drives a cloud bill

Most cloud spend comes from four buckets:

Compute: Running services — instances, containers, or serverless invocations. Usually the largest line item.
Storage: Disk and database storage, billed per GB-month, plus IOPS on some tiers.
Egress (data transfer out): Bytes leaving the cloud to the internet. Famously expensive and easy to forget — a key reason to weigh a CDN or an egress-free provider.
Requests / messages: Per-operation charges — API Gateway requests, queue messages, function calls.

SKUs and sizing

A SKU is a specific purchasable unit — say an db.r6g.large Postgres instance or an S3 storage class. Skeema maps each node to a realistic SKU from 2026 AWS, GCP, Azure, and self-hostedpricing. Pick a traffic preset (Startup, Growth, Scale, Enterprise) and Skeema auto-sizes each node — bumping instance tiers and replica counts to match the load.

Per-node overrides

Disagree with a default? Override the SKU on any node. Compute and gateway nodes scale their replica count with the preset (1 / 2 / 3 / 5); storage and cache scale by capacity.

Traffic-variable costs

Some costs only appear under load. Skeema models the big ones:

•Egress = data-out (GB) × the provider’s per-GB rate.
•DB storage = stored GB × rate.
•Queue = RPS × seconds/month ÷ 1M × per-message rate.

Insights

Beyond a number, Skeema surfaces auto-insights — e.g. “compute dominates this bill; Reserved Instances would save ~30%” or “egress is your second-largest cost; a CDN would cut it.” These point you at the line items worth optimizing first.

Estimates, not invoices

Pricing changes, and real bills depend on actual usage, commitments, and discounts. Use Skeema’s estimate to compare designs and catch expensive choices early — then confirm with the provider’s calculator before committing.

Key takeaways

✓Cloud cost = compute + storage + egress + requests. Egress is the sneaky one.
✓Skeema maps real SKUs to nodes and auto-sizes them by traffic preset.
✓Override SKUs per node; insights point you at the biggest savings.
✓Treat the figure as directional — great for comparing designs, not a guaranteed invoice.