AWS vs Azure vs GCP:
Which Cloud Costs Less?

For identical on-demand, pay-as-you-go specs the three hyperscalers are close, with Google Cloud usually a little cheaper on compute (roughly $12.50 per vCPU-month on its e2 family versus about $15 for AWS t3 and Azure B-series) and Azure slightly cheaper on object storage. The real gap is not between the big three — it is between any hyperscaler and a budget VPS provider. For a small 2 vCPU / 4 GB workload, Hetzner can cost a quarter of what AWS charges on compute alone.

Almost always on raw infrastructure. DigitalOcean and Vultr price a 2 vCPU / 4 GB instance around $24/month versus roughly $30 on AWS, with far cheaper egress ($0.01/GB versus $0.09/GB and a free terabyte on DigitalOcean). Hetzner is the price leader at about $8/month for comparable specs and 20 TB of included traffic. The trade-off is ecosystem: hyperscalers offer hundreds of managed services, global regions, enterprise support and compliance certifications that smaller providers do not. You are paying for that ecosystem when you stay on AWS.

This calculator adds three components for each provider: compute (your vCPUs multiplied by the provider's per-vCPU monthly rate, adjusted for region), storage (your gigabytes multiplied by the object-storage rate per GB-month), and bandwidth (your monthly egress, minus any free allowance, multiplied by the per-GB egress price). The total is the estimated monthly bill, which we multiply for the annual and 3-year figures. RAM is bundled into each instance family at a standard 2:1 ratio for these general-purpose tiers.

On-demand pricing is pay-as-you-go with no commitment — the most flexible and the most expensive. Reserved or committed-use pricing means promising to run an instance for one or three years in exchange for a discount, typically 40–60% on AWS, Azure and GCP. Budget providers like DigitalOcean, Vultr and Hetzner generally sell flat on-demand rates with no reserved tier. Toggle "committed-use pricing" in the calculator to see how a 3-year commitment narrows the gap — though a VPS usually stays cheaper even after hyperscaler discounts.

It depends on your workload, but compute savings of 50–75% and bandwidth savings of up to 90% are common for straightforward web apps, APIs and staging environments. A medium 4 vCPU / 8 GB workload with 100 GB storage and 500 GB egress runs roughly $90/month on AWS but around $30–55/month on DigitalOcean or Vultr, and under $20/month on Hetzner. Workloads that depend on managed databases, serverless functions or deep cloud-native integrations save less, because those services have no cheap equivalent.

Yes, modestly. Hyperscaler compute pricing varies by region — US East and US West are typically the cheapest, while European regions run about 5–10% more and Asia-Pacific regions can be 10–15% more. Storage and egress prices are fairly flat across regions for these tiers. This calculator applies a regional multiplier to the compute portion of the bill; select your target region to see the adjusted estimate.