Cost
What a terabyte actually costs
A terabyte costs around $23 a month on Snowflake and around $20 on BigQuery. The same terabyte as a drive costs $12 to $18, once. That ratio reads like a sales argument and is not one — at least not in this form. What sits in between is the actual article.
Storage is the line item people argue about least on a warehouse invoice. It is small next to compute, it grows slowly, and it rarely gets in the way. Which is exactly why it rarely gets checked — and exactly why it is a good way into the question of how the two operating models differ.
What the cloud charges
| Provider | Price per terabyte per month | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Snowflake (on-demand) | around $23 | AWS US East, as of 2026; $20 to $40 depending on region |
| BigQuery (active) | around $20 | $0.02 per GB per month, for tables changed within 90 days |
| BigQuery (long-term) | around $10 | automatic discount after 90 days without changes |
For 100 terabytes over five years that is roughly $138,000 on Snowflake, purely for the data sitting there. The number is not in dispute; it is in the price list. What is in dispute is what you hold it against.
What the medium costs
A new enterprise SATA drive sits at $12 to $18 per terabyte in 2026 — once, not monthly. Over a five-year life that is around 25 cents per terabyte per month. The ratio against $23 is roughly a hundred to one.
That ratio is correctly calculated and still misleading. A bare drive is not a storage service.
What sits between the drive and a usable object store is the part the calculation above leaves out:
- Redundancy. Erasure coding costs one and a half times the raw capacity depending on the layout; three-way replication costs three times.
- A second copy. Redundancy is not a backup — it protects against a failed drive, not against an accidental DROP.
- Enclosures, networking, rack, power, cooling.
- People. Drives fail, firmware wants updating, capacity wants planning.
Allow one and a half times for erasure coding and a full second copy, and a usable terabyte of media costs roughly $36 to $54 once. Over five years that is about 60 to 90 cents a month. Even at ten times that for rack, power and operations you stay under ten dollars — but the honest sentence is this: the drive is not the cost, and holding it against a cloud price compares a screw to a car.
The timing is bad
Between September 2025 and March 2026, enterprise hard drive prices rose by 46 to 50 percent. The reason is demand from the AI build-out: hyperscaler forward orders have consumed WD and Seagate production through the end of 2026. Buying storage now means buying it expensive. That is an argument about timing, not about the model — cloud prices rest on the same procurement.
The line item that is not in the storage line
The more important difference is not in the storage line at all. In a warehouse billed by credits, data volume drives compute too: every query that reads more data costs more. The storage line grows linearly with volume; the credit line grows with volume times usage — and the credit line is the big one.
On your own hardware that coupling disappears. More data needs more room, and room is bought once. More speed needs more cores, and cores are bought once. What does not happen is the same query getting more expensive because the table behind it grew.
Your data volume appears nowhere in this price list. It sits on your storage.
The third way: colocation
Between “all of it in your own basement” and “all of it in the cloud” sits colocation: you buy the hardware, someone else provides space, power, cooling and connectivity. For the cost calculation that shifts three items.
| Item | Own data centre | Colocation | Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardware | you buy it | you buy it | included in the price |
| Space and cooling | you provide it | rent per rack unit | included in the price |
| Power | your bill | usually metered | included in the price |
| Operations | your people | your people, often with remote hands | the provider's |
| Data sovereignty | complete | contractual, location of your choosing | under the provider's jurisdiction |
Colocation is the route for organizations that want control over hardware and data but are not going to build a data centre. For the sovereignty question, the decisive point is not the cost line but the location and the law the operator answers to.
What this means for your own calculation
- Storage alone does not justify a move. At 10 terabytes we are talking about roughly $2,800 a year — that does not pay for a migration.
- From three-digit terabytes the line becomes noticeable, and for tables that are read often the credit line becomes noticeable long before that.
- Do not hold the medium against the cloud price. Hold medium times redundancy times two copies, plus rack, power and people, against it.
- The comparison that counts is the whole invoice: storage, compute, egress and licence against hardware, power, operations and subscription.
For that last point there is a calculator on this site in which every assumption is visible and adjustable. Storage is not a separate item there; it sits inside the surcharge on hardware and power — for exactly the reason above: on your own hardware it is not a line of its own.
Per-terabyte prices from the providers' published lists, as of 2026; media prices from the market for new enterprise SATA drives. The allowances for erasure coding, a second copy and operations are assumptions made by this article, not measurements.
Sources
Every figure in this article is sourced. Where no defensible source exists, no figure is given.