About cloudcost
Our mission
Cloud pricing is deliberately confusing. Three hyperscalers, dozens of instance families, per-second billing, egress fees and reserved-instance math make it nearly impossible to answer the simplest question: “what will this workload actually cost me per month?” cloudcost exists to answer that with numbers, not marketing. Enter your vCPUs, RAM, storage and bandwidth and get a side-by-side cost comparison across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and three budget VPS providers — plus the 3-year total cost of ownership and how much you could save by switching.
How we calculate costs
For each provider the calculator sums three components into an estimated monthly bill:
- Compute— your number of vCPUs multiplied by the provider's per-vCPU monthly rate for its general-purpose / burstable instance family, then adjusted by a regional multiplier (US-East is the 1.0 baseline; EU and Asia-Pacific run slightly higher).
- Storage— your gigabytes multiplied by the provider's standard object-storage rate per GB-month (S3, Blob, Cloud Storage, Spaces, etc.).
- Bandwidth — your monthly egress minus any free allowance, multiplied by the per-GB egress price. Free tiers range from 100 GB on the hyperscalers to 1 TB on DigitalOcean and 20 TB on Hetzner.
The annual figure is monthly × 12 and the 3-year TCO is monthly × 36. When you enable committed-use pricing, we apply an approximate 1–3 year reserved discount (roughly 40–47% off) to the three hyperscalers that offer it; VPS providers keep their flat on-demand rates. RAM is bundled into each instance family at a standard 2:1 ratio for these tiers, so compute is the driver of the price.
Reference rates (2026)
On-demand list prices, US-East region, monthly billing. All figures in USD.
| Provider | Compute /vCPU·mo | Storage /GB·mo | Egress /GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS EC2 | $15 | $0.02 | $0.09 |
| Azure Virtual Machines | $15 | $0.02 | $0.09 |
| Google Cloud | $13 | $0.02 | $0.09 |
| DigitalOcean | $12 | $0.01 | $0.01 |
| Vultr | $12 | $0.01 | $0.01 |
| Hetzner Cloud | $4 | $0.01 | $0.00 |
Data sources
- Public on-demand pricing pages for each provider (AWS EC2, Azure VMs, Google Cloud Compute)
- Standard object-storage list prices (S3, Azure Blob, Google Cloud Storage, DigitalOcean Spaces)
- Published internet-egress rates and included-transfer allowances
- Typical reserved / committed-use discount ranges reported by each hyperscaler
Rates are rounded and refreshed as providers change their pricing. Cloud pricing moves often — always confirm a final figure on the provider's own calculator before you commit.
Important disclaimer
cloudcost provides estimates for general information only and is independent of every provider listed. Real bills vary with region, commitment terms, instance family, data transfer patterns, support plans and taxes. Nothing here is financial advice or an offer. This is a simplified model of list pricing — it does not capture every fee, credit or free-tier nuance. Confirm figures with each provider before making a purchasing decision.