> things that are moderately hard to understand My experience with AWS is that the pricing for each service is reasonably well documented and the calculator do

> things that are moderately hard to understand My experience with AWS is that the pricing for each service is reasonably well documented and the calculator does descent job. The problem starts when multiple combinations of services are used and it becomes harder to reason. With the advent of cloud, cost-modelling becomes an essential skill (which can be learned). One needs to be clear about total work that gets done and "how" that work gets processed. This in turn should translate to relevant cost metric (e.g PUT requests/s for S3 or IOPS for DynamoDB, amount of data scanned for Athena, etc) This needs to be evaluated for zero load, normal load, 5x load, 20x load, etc. Zero load gives what is dead weight cost of the system i.e cost incurred when no work is being done (e.g EC2, EBS volumes, etc)