We Built a Free Carbon Calculator for Cloud Projects — Here’s Why and How

Every time I heard the question, “Can you quickly estimate the carbon impact of this cloud setup?” my heart would sink a little.

Not because I didn’t care — quite the opposite. But because the tools just didn’t exist to make that request easy. If you've ever had to answer it, you know the drill: spreadsheets, assumptions, vendor reports, vague models, and hours you don’t have.

So we decided to fix that.

🌱 The Problem: Carbon Reporting in Cloud Projects Is Painful

More and more teams are being asked to account for the environmental impact of their IT infrastructure — either for ESG reporting, internal sustainability targets, or just because someone on the board suddenly wants to know.

The issue is: the cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) don’t give you real-time or forecastable emissions data in a usable way. What you get is either:

• Delayed reports (months later),
• Estimates based on broad regional averages,
• Or dashboards with little granularity.

If you want to know, “What’s the CO₂ footprint of this architecture before I build it?” — you're on your own.

🛠️ The Solution: A Carbon Calculator That Works Like a Pricing Tool

We built a free Carbon Calculator that works the way you're used to — like a cloud pricing calculator — but instead of showing cost, it shows CO₂ emissions.

You pick the services you plan to use (e.g., EC2, S3, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Azure Functions, etc.), and the calculator returns an emissions estimate instantly — based on real, service-level data.

• No login. No sign-up. No fluff.

We cover the stuff modern teams actually use:

• Virtual machines
• Kubernetes
• Serverless (Lambda, Cloud Functions, Azure Functions)
• DBaaS
• Object & block storage
• Analytics platforms
• …and more.

We built it to be frictionless. You can share the results, tweak configs, and use it during early architecture decisions — not after the fact.

🔍 Why It’s Different
Most carbon calculators out there fall into one of two buckets:

Too generic — They use average grid emissions or vague categories like "compute" or "storage" without mapping to actual cloud services.

Too complicated — They require deep technical input, historical usage data, or a dedicated sustainability team to operate.

Ours is meant for developers, cloud architects, and infra teams who want a fast answer — whether they're checking a box for compliance or making intentional design decisions.

It’s designed for speed, transparency, and simplicity. And we’ll keep improving it based on real-world usage.

👥 Who’s It For?
We originally built this for internal use, but quickly realized others needed it too. Since then, we've seen it used by:

• SaaS teams calculating emissions for onboarding new enterprise clients
• Infra engineers testing the carbon tradeoffs of architectural changes
• Sustainability officers working with the IT team for the first time
• Consultants who need to give ballpark figures to clients — fast

If you’re even adjacent to cloud infrastructure and emissions reporting, you’ve probably felt this pain.

🚀 Why We Made It Free
Because awareness and accessibility matter.

We believe that making carbon data easier to access will lead to better decisions — and that starts by removing friction. You shouldn’t need a PhD in sustainability or an enterprise sales call to get basic visibility.

Our hope is that by making this tool freely available, more teams will consider emissions in their architecture choices — and do so earlier, when it actually matters.

🙌 We'd Love Your Feedback
If this sounds useful, take it for a spin and let us know what you think. We’re actively building and improving based on community input — and we’d love to hear how it works for your team.

🔗 oxygenit.io/product-pages/carbon-calculator

Happy to share how we built it, how the emissions estimates work, or what’s coming next.

Let’s make carbon data as normal and accessible as cost data.