AWS vs Azure vs GCP Pricing Comparison 2026.
A like-for-like price comparison across the three hyperscalers — compute, storage, egress, committed-use programs, and discount mechanics. The reference document for any multi-cloud counterposition in your next AWS negotiation.
What's inside.
This 64-page comparison white paper benchmarks AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud on the price dimensions that actually matter in an enterprise negotiation: compute on-demand and committed pricing, block and object storage tiers, egress and inter-region transfer, managed database services, AI/ML inference, and the structure of each vendor's enterprise discount agreement. The data set anonymizes 500+ negotiation engagements and $2.4 billion in reviewed cloud spend.
Vendors publish list prices, but list prices are not what enterprises pay. The real comparison sits inside the EDP (AWS), the MACC (Azure), and the CUD/Committed-Spend (Google) contracts. Each vendor uses different discount mechanics, different commitment structures, and different sweeteners (credits, migration funding, support inclusion). A surface-level rate-card comparison will mislead a procurement team into either over-committing or under-leveraging. This white paper normalizes the comparison.
The 2026 edition incorporates the post-egress-reform pricing landscape (all three vendors waived egress for migrations off-platform in 2024-2025), updated Graviton/Ampere/Axion ARM pricing, Bedrock vs Azure OpenAI vs Vertex AI inference rates, and current credit-program benchmarks for new workloads. Sample BATNA models showing how to counterposition each vendor against the others are included in the appendix.
Table of contents
- Executive summary — how to read a multi-cloud price comparison
- Compute — EC2 vs Azure VM vs GCE on-demand, committed, and spot
- Storage — S3 vs Blob vs GCS tiering, retrieval, and lifecycle costs
- Egress — data transfer pricing across the three providers post-2025 reform
- Managed databases — RDS vs Azure SQL/Cosmos vs Cloud SQL/Spanner
- AI & ML — Bedrock vs Azure OpenAI vs Vertex AI inference pricing
- Discount programs — EDP vs MACC vs Committed-Spend mechanics side-by-side
- BATNA construction — building a credible counterposition
- Appendix A — full rate card comparison tables (50+ services)
- Appendix B — sample multi-cloud counter-offer letter and term comparison
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Built on 500+ engagements.
Every figure, benchmark, and recommendation in this white paper is grounded in primary data from real AWS negotiation engagements. We have advised on more than $2.4 billion in AWS spend across 500+ engagements, spanning financial services, SaaS, media, retail, healthcare, public sector, and AI-native companies. The data set is anonymized and aggregated; no individual customer agreement is identifiable.
This white paper is buyer-side analysis. It is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or reviewed by Amazon Web Services. The recommendations reflect what works in negotiation against AWS's standard playbook, not AWS's preferred customer behavior. Where the two diverge, we have written from the customer's perspective.
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