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Blockchain is of rising importance as a technology for engineering applications in cross-organizational settings, avoiding reliance on central trusted third-parties. The use of blockchain, instead of traditional databases or services, is an architectural choice in the development of a software system. Architecture impacts the non-functional qualities of systems, creating design trade-offs between these qualities. The costs of execution and storage are important non-functional qualities, but as yet little is known about them for blockchain-based systems. How expensive is it to use blockchains compared to conventional execution and storage infrastructure? We investigate this question using business process execution as a lens. Specifically, we compare the cost for computation and storage of business process execution on blockchain vs. a popular cloud service. Besides monetary cost, blockchains like Ethereum limit the …