ICP cost comparison with AWS

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I would appreciate if team can give clarity about the cost comparison with AWS. lately I came across this thread which suggests overall cost of Internet Computer is much higher than AWS. In my opinion this has implications for high data usage projects such as Metaverse and gamefi.

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Tagging @bob11 since he is the author of the ICP.guide

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Hey @BenManz! Welcome to the community! A list of caveats first:

  1. Hazel did a cool analysis and posted to Twitter
  2. I did some extrapolation and comparison
  3. Neither of us have done any extremely rigorous cost comparisons, but these costs felt pretty close, and close enough to share.

As for being more expensive, it depends on what you mean. AWS subsidizes data-in costs in order to convince you to store data there, and then up-charges you on data-out for the rest of your life. So data-in is more expensive on the IC.

Data-out however is much more affordable on the IC. So I expect low frequency data-in and high frequency data-out applications to fare very well on the IC.

We are in need of more advanced cost comparison analyses, but this was a pretty good start I think.

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Thanks bob for ur input. We were looking to migrate mataverse project but find it difficult to have long term cost implications.

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Hey Bob! Searched the internet for this question and this still seems to be an important question.

Need the cost comparison because that will always be an important decision for users.

Will let you know if I find anything more substantial but if not it would be good to speak to someone that could give us a more detailed analysis.

I think it’ll be some great content🤓

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You cannot just say ICP is more or less expensive than AWS. It depends on what services or features you’re comparing.

To get accurate estimates why not use the cost info contained here and create some scenarios based on your app’s needs? Paying for resources in cycles | Internet Computer

Also I like to think of it this way: ICP will be replicating your application 13-40 times on performant and thus expensive hardware. This cost has to be born by the network somewhere.

Then think about a similar app on AWS. If the replication isn’t worth paying for, perhaps ICP is not currently the correct platform for you.

To keep it really simple, I have a personal hueristic: ICP is ~10x (or one order of magnitude) more expensive than traditional cloud.

It is much cheaper generally than other Bitcoin or Ethereum mainnet.

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Hello sir, thank you so much for this guidance!

I’d like to explore the idea of transferring simple business applications to the IC as a way to eliminate the need to incur cybersecurity costs and remove the risks associated with it i.e UTOPIA.

Examples of “Simple” business applications:

  • a basic eCommerce store
  • a financial services company with an onboarding form where the customers provide their whole life story and all their confidential data)

Do you think your heuristic is a good estimate for these types of simple applications?

For companies like this, the web app expenses are not exactly a material line item on their income statement so I’d imagine that even a 10X increase in the costs of running their web app by putting it on the IC would still be well worth it.

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Hi Ben

Thank you for this informarion back in 22 :slight_smile:

Can we get an updated version comparing ICP with AWS?

Let’s say I build an app.

  1. How much does it cost to upload 1GM of images
  2. How Much does it cost to download 1GM of images?

More examples could be helpful for Example:

AWS
100 GB/ month CDN bandwidth

ICP
Equal to this?

Thanks.

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I can answer 1/2 of this question.

Query calls (to fetch data without persisting state mutations in a canister) are currently free. So downloading 1GB or 1TB is $0. There is a proposal for query charging, so this could change in the future.

Much of this depends on the logic that you use to upload/store the image and the size of each image. I’d imagine @peterparker might have some data and estimates from the work he’s done on Juno.

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I only have cost estimations based on a few observations I made; I didn’t go into the details. If it’s useful, you can find them on the Juno website.

Another option for estimating costs is the relatively new tool released by the foundation: a pricing calculator with some handy presets.

You can find it on the portal:

Or as a standalone version:

https://3d5wy-5aaaa-aaaag-qkhsq-cai.icp0.io/

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