Cloud pricing comparison
The list price of one like-for-like service shape on AWS, Azure and Google Cloud, read from each provider’s public price list and refreshed daily. It is a price, not a bill: no reservations, no committed-use discounts, no free tier. Each cell links to the page the number came from.
A monthly bill for one shape on each cloud, from the list prices below. Add backup, disaster recovery, zone redundancy or a commitment and each becomes its own segment of the bar, so the increase is itemised rather than hidden in a total.
Two application servers, one managed relational database, object storage and a CDN.
Extras0
Edit quantities1,460 h Virtual machine · 200 GB Object storage · 730 h Relational database · 500 GB CDN egress
Loading prices for this scenario…
How this is calculated
Every line is quantity × factor × the unit price in the table below this card, live from the provider’s price list or the site’s catalogue figure where the list could not be read. Extras are priced off the same eight meters; the factors are these:
- Backup — Object-storage GB-months equal to 100% of the object storage plus 20% of a 100 GB relational database (when the scenario has one), for 30 days of retention, priced at the provider’s backup-tier share of the hot object-storage rate.
- DR: pilot light — A second-region copy of object storage (×1), a relational database replica (×1 of its hours) and replication egress of 10% of the storage GB per month at the CDN egress rate.
- DR: warm standby — Pilot light, plus virtual-machine and Kubernetes hours at 50% of the scenario’s hours in the second region.
- DR: active-active — Every service ×1 again in the second region, plus cross-region egress of 25% of the CDN egress quantity at the CDN rate.
- Zone redundancy — An uplift on object storage and the relational database: ×0 where the listed price is already zone-redundant (S3 Standard, Cloud Storage regional), +25% for Azure ZRS over LRS, and +100% on the database for a standby instance (RDS Multi-AZ, Azure SQL zone redundancy, Cloud SQL HA).
- 1-year commitment — A discount taken off virtual-machine, Kubernetes and relational-database lines: 28% on AWS (Compute Savings Plans, RDS reserved), 35% on Azure (reservations), 37% on Google Cloud (committed-use).
- 3-year commitment — A discount taken off virtual-machine, Kubernetes and relational-database lines: 50% on AWS, 60% on Azure, 55% on Google Cloud.
| Assumption | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hours in a billing month | 730 | 730 | 730 | |
| Backup storage rate, as a share of the hot object-storage rate | ×0.6 | ×0.5 | ×0.5 | |
| Relational database size assumed for backups (GB) | 100 | 100 | 100 | |
| Share of the database captured per backup cycle | ×0.2 | ×0.2 | ×0.2 | |
| Backup retention (days) | 30 | 30 | 30 | |
| Pilot light: monthly replication egress, as a share of storage GB | ×0.1 | ×0.1 | ×0.1 | |
| Warm standby: compute and Kubernetes hours in the second region | ×0.5 | ×0.5 | ×0.5 | |
| Active-active: cross-region egress, as a share of CDN egress | ×0.25 | ×0.25 | ×0.25 | |
| Zone redundancy: uplift on object storage | ×0 | ×0.25 | ×0 | |
| Zone redundancy: uplift on the relational database | ×1 | ×1 | ×1 | |
| 1-year commitment: discount on compute, Kubernetes and the database | 28% | 35% | 37% | |
| 3-year commitment: discount on compute, Kubernetes and the database | 50% | 60% | 55% |
| Service | AWS | Azure | Google Cloud |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loading prices… | |||
List prices that moved in this region, against the daily sample from a week or a month ago. Nothing here is a bill either.
Loading price changes…