Cloud Cost Comparisons

Cloud pricing only makes sense in comparison. On its own, a $0.096 hourly rate tells you nothing; the same workload might cost $0.04 on a competing provider’s spot market or $0.07 with a 3-year reservation. This section collects head-to-head comparisons that put equivalent services side by side, so you can see the real cost difference at a glance.

How to Read These Comparisons

Every comparison table on CloudCost uses the same columns:

• Service — the equivalent instance, storage, or network service on each provider.
• Specification — vCPU, memory, and local storage, so the comparison is apples-to-apples.
• On-demand price — the published list price for the baseline region (typically us-east-1, East US, us-central1).
• Reserved / committed price — the price with the most common 1-year No Upfront commitment, so you see the realistic steady-state cost.
• Notes — caveats such as free tier eligibility, egress rules, or feature differences.

Available Comparisons

• AWS vs Azure — Compute — general-purpose VM families compared across on-demand, 1-year reserved, and spot pricing.
• AWS vs GCP — Storage — S3 versus Cloud Storage, with per-GB storage, request, and retrieval pricing.

More comparisons covering databases, networking, and the Alibaba Cloud ecosystem are added regularly. If there is a comparison you would like to see, open an issue on the GitHub repository.