Choosing the right cloud provider in 2026 is one of the most financially significant decisions a technology team can make. With cloud spend growing at 20%+ per year and costs visible on every CFO's agenda, getting the pricing right matters. This guide compares AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI across every major cost category with real 2026 prices.
Compute — The Biggest Cost Driver
Compute typically represents 40-60% of total cloud spend. Here's how the major providers compare for a standard 8 vCPU / 32GB RAM general-purpose instance in Singapore/Asia Pacific:
| Cloud | Instance | On-Demand/hr | 1yr Reserved | Monthly (1yr) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| OCI E5.Flex | 4 OCPU / 32GB | $0.080 | $0.056 | $41 |
| GCP n2-standard-8 | 8 vCPU / 32GB | $0.378 | $0.219 | $160 |
| Azure D8s v5 | 8 vCPU / 32GB | $0.384 | $0.240 | $175 |
| AWS m7i.2xlarge | 8 vCPU / 32GB | $0.403 | $0.258 | $188 |
Key finding: OCI is dramatically cheaper for compute — 78% cheaper than AWS on 1-year reserved pricing. For organisations that don't have hard dependencies on AWS-specific managed services, OCI delivers the same workload for a fraction of the cost.
Egress Fees — The Hidden Cost That Changes Everything
Egress fees are the most underestimated cost in cloud pricing. Every gigabyte of data leaving your cloud to the internet is charged by the provider. The differences are enormous:
- AWS: $0.09/GB (first 100GB free)
- Azure: $0.087/GB (first 10GB free)
- GCP: $0.08/GB (first 100GB free)
- OCI: $0.0085/GB (first 10TB free for paid accounts)
At 100TB/month of egress: AWS costs $9,000, Azure $8,700, GCP $8,000 — and OCI costs $850. That single difference can justify an entire cloud migration for data-heavy applications like media streaming, large file downloads, or high-volume API services.
Storage Pricing Comparison
Object storage (S3-equivalent) pricing per GB/month:
- AWS S3 Standard: $0.0207/GB (after March 2026 price cut)
- Azure Blob Hot: $0.018/GB
- GCP Cloud Storage Standard: $0.020/GB
- OCI Object Storage: $0.0255/GB (but with 10TB free egress, total cost is lower)
Managed Database Costs
For a PostgreSQL database (8 vCPU, 32GB, Multi-AZ/HA) in AP region:
- AWS RDS PostgreSQL Multi-AZ: $835/month
- Azure PostgreSQL Flexible HA: $424/month (after Jan 2026 price cut)
- GCP Cloud SQL PostgreSQL HA: $364/month (after July 2025 price cut)
- OCI MySQL HeatWave HA: $247/month
Azure reduced managed PostgreSQL pricing 20% in January 2026, making it the best value among hyperscalers for this workload.
Kubernetes (Managed K8s) Costs
Control plane costs per cluster/month:
- AWS EKS: $73/month per cluster (reduced from $73 to $58 in Sept 2025)
- Azure AKS: Free control plane
- GCP GKE Standard: $73/month
- OCI OKE: Free control plane
AI and LLM API Pricing (April 2026)
For teams building AI applications, API costs are increasingly significant:
- GPT-4o (Azure OpenAI): $2.50/M input, $10/M output tokens
- Claude claude-sonnet-4-20250514 (Bedrock): $3.00/M input, $15/M output
- Gemini 2.0 Pro (Vertex): $1.25/M input, $5/M output — cheapest enterprise LLM
- Gemini 2.0 Flash: $0.10/M input, $0.40/M output — best value for most tasks
- Llama 3.3 70B (OCI GenAI): $0.00045/1K tokens — 3× cheaper than Bedrock
Which Cloud Is Cheapest in 2026?
There is no single answer — it depends on your workload:
- Pure compute + data egress: OCI wins decisively — 60-80% cheaper on compute, 10× cheaper on egress
- Managed services + ecosystem: AWS has the deepest catalogue; Azure benefits Microsoft shops through Hybrid Benefit licensing
- AI/ML workloads: GCP wins on H100 pricing (A4 at $32.77/hr vs AWS p5 at $98.32/hr) and LLM API cost
- PostgreSQL databases: Azure is now the best hyperscaler value after Jan 2026 price cut
- Serverless containers: GCP Cloud Run is now cheapest after March 2026 25% price cut
How to Calculate Your Specific Cost
Use TCOIQ's free tools to model your exact workload across all 5 clouds:
- VM Compare — instant price comparison for any instance spec
- TCO Calculator — upload your bill for full 5-year analysis
- ROI Calculator — model your savings from optimisation