Cloud Computing Cost Comparison 2026: AWS vs Azure vs GCP

Cloud computing is now the #2 expense at midsize IT companies, behind only labor. The average company spends $1.2 million annually on cloud services, and 30% of that is estimated to be wasted on unused or over-provisioned resources.

This guide compares pricing across the three major cloud providers to help you make informed decisions and optimize spending.

Quick Answer: For most workloads, the three providers are within 10-15% of each other in pricing. The real cost differences come from commitment discounts, data egress fees, and service-specific pricing.

General Purpose Instances (4 vCPU, 16GB RAM, Linux, US East):

Provider	Service	On-Demand/hr	1-Year Reserved	3-Year Reserved
AWS	m7i.xlarge	$0.192	$0.121 (37% off)	$0.076 (60% off)
Azure	D4s v6	$0.192	$0.115 (40% off)	$0.073 (62% off)
GCP	n2-standard-4	$0.194	$0.122 (37% off)	$0.087 (55% off)

GPU Instances (NVIDIA A100):

Provider	On-Demand/hr	Spot/Preemptible
AWS (p4d)	$32.77	$9.83-$15
Azure (NC A100)	$32.77	$10-$16
GCP (a2-highgpu)	$31.21	$9.36-$12

Key Takeaway: On-demand prices are nearly identical. The real savings come from commitment plans (reserved instances or savings plans) and spot/preemptible instances.

Object Storage (per GB/month):

Tier	AWS S3	Azure Blob	GCP Cloud Storage
Standard	$0.023	$0.018	$0.020
Infrequent Access	$0.0125	$0.010	$0.010
Archive	$0.004	$0.002	$0.004

Block Storage (SSD, per GB/month):

Provider	Standard SSD	Premium SSD
AWS EBS gp3	$0.08	$0.125
Azure Premium	$0.10	$0.15
GCP PD-SSD	$0.17	$0.17

Azure tends to be cheapest for cold/archive storage. AWS is competitive for standard storage. GCP block storage is more expensive but simpler pricing.

1. Data Egress (the "cloud tax") All three providers charge for outbound data transfer:

• First 100 GB/month: Free (all providers)
• 100 GB - 10 TB: $0.08-$0.09/GB
• At scale: A company transferring 10 TB/month pays $800-$900/month just in egress

2. Support Plans

• Basic: Free (limited)
• Developer: $29-$100/month
• Business: $100+/month or 5-10% of spend
• Enterprise: $5,500+/month or 3-10% of spend

3. Monitoring & Logging

• CloudWatch/Monitor/Cloud Monitoring: $0.30-$3.00 per metric per month
• Log ingestion: $0.50-$0.75 per GB
• Can easily reach $500-$5,000/month for large deployments

4. API Gateway & Load Balancer

• Load balancers: $15-$25/month each + data processing fees
• API Gateway: $1-$3.50 per million requests

5. Managed Databases

• 30-80% premium over self-managed
• Multi-AZ deployments double the cost

1. Right-sizing - 40% of cloud instances are over-provisioned. Use provider tools (AWS Compute Optimizer, Azure Advisor, GCP Recommender) to identify waste. 2. Reserved/Committed Use - Save 30-60% with 1-3 year commitments for predictable workloads. 3. Spot/Preemptible Instances - Save 60-90% for fault-tolerant batch processing, CI/CD, and dev/test environments. 4. Auto-scaling - Only pay for what you use by implementing proper auto-scaling policies. 5. Storage Lifecycle Policies - Automatically move old data to cheaper storage tiers. 6. Shut Down Dev/Test - Schedule non-production environments to run only during business hours (save 65%). 7. Multi-Cloud Strategy - Use each provider's strengths. GCP for data/ML, AWS for breadth, Azure for Microsoft integration. But beware of added complexity.

Companies that actively optimize typically reduce cloud spend by 25-35%.