TCO

Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is the full accounting of what a system costs to run: infrastructure list prices after discounts, plus licenses, plus the people time to operate it, plus the indirect costs of incidents, lock-in, and capacity mistakes.

Cloud bill comparisons usually stop at compute and storage list prices. A fair TCO model adds egress, snapshots, support plans, the engineering hours consumed by operational complexity, and the cost of the commitments (reserved terms, minimums) required to reach the advertised rates.

The punchline of most TCO analyses: the provider with the lowest sticker price is rarely the cheapest at your real workload profile. Model your own traffic, include egress explicitly, and discount any price that requires a three-year commitment to appear.