Quick answer
A cloud cost calculator estimates your monthly bill from each provider's list prices. Playxoft's free cloud cost calculator prices one workload on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Cloudflare from official prices checked October 14, 2026. In US East, a small SaaS app (two servers, PostgreSQL, file storage and 200 GB of egress) costs $255.88 a month on Google Cloud, $304.15 on AWS and $316.04 on Azure. Of the 6 presets, AWS is cheapest for 3, Google Cloud for 2 and Cloudflare for 1.
- 4 clouds side by side
- Official list prices
- 12 regions
- Free tiers applied
- Every line explained
- Share link and CSV
How to use the Cloud Cost Calculator
- 1Pick a preset such as Small SaaS or Mobile app backend, or Start empty and add only the services you use.
- 2Choose the Region closest to your users. Prices differ from region to region.
- 3Adjust each item, or press + Servers, + File storage and the other add buttons to add more, such as a second group of servers or another bucket. Each i icon explains its field.
- 4Compare the monthly totals. The cheapest cloud that offers every service you added is marked Cheapest.
- 5Open Cost breakdown to see the arithmetic behind each line, then Copy link to share the estimate or download it as CSV.
Which cloud is cheapest: AWS, Azure, Google Cloud or Cloudflare?
There is no single cheapest cloud: it depends on what your app does. Here are the 6 presets priced in US East with list prices from October 14, 2026. Bold marks the cheapest cloud that offers every service in the workload.
| Workload | AWS | Google Cloud | Azure | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Small SaaS: 2 app servers, PostgreSQL, file storage | $304.15 | $255.88 | $316.04 | No VMs |
| Mobile app backend: serverless API, NoSQL, user uploads | $84.63 | $164.48 | $103.80 | $113.10 |
| Static site + API: CDN-served site with a few serverless endpoints | $3.50 | $70.59 | $89.95 | $5.15 |
| Game servers: 4 always-on servers, player data, heavy traffic | $897.39 | $972.78 | $984.28 | No VMs |
| Media and downloads: 5 TB of files, 10 TB downloaded a month | $1,052.80 | $1,246.18 | $1,012.10 | $113.25 |
| Side project: one small server and a little traffic | $9.19 | $4.28 | $12.87 | No VMs |
Across all 72 combinations of the 6 presets and 12 regions, the cheapest cloud was AWS in 40, Google Cloud in 19, Cloudflare in 13 and Azure in none. Three patterns explain most of the differences:
- Always-on servers. AWS and Azure charge the same hourly price for their general-purpose m6i and Dsv5 machines ($0.096 an hour for 2 vCPU and 8 GB in US East). Google lists $0.097118, but automatically takes up to 20% off N2 machines that run all month, so its server cost is usually the lowest. Its $0.12 per GB egress can cancel that out: in the Game servers preset, with 3,000 GB sent to users a month, AWS costs $897.39 against $972.78 on Google Cloud.
- Data sent to users. This is where bills diverge most. After the free allowance, AWS charges $0.09 per GB, Azure $0.087 and Google $0.12 on its default Premium Tier. Cloudflare charges nothing for data sent from Workers and R2, which is why it wins media-heavy workloads by a wide margin.
- Small serverless apps. Always-free allowances (1 million Lambda requests, 2 million Cloud Run requests, 1 million Azure Functions executions a month) cover many small APIs completely, while Cloudflare's paid Workers plan starts at $5 a month.
Cloudflare rents no virtual machines, so any workload with servers shows "No VMs" in its column. Switch the region in the calculator to see the same comparison in any of the 12 regions, from Oregon and São Paulo to Frankfurt, Mumbai, Tokyo and Sydney.
What does each cloud call the same service?
Each provider names its products differently, which is half of what makes cloud pricing confusing. This is the mapping the calculator uses:
| What you need | AWS | Google Cloud | Azure | Cloudflare |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Virtual machines | Amazon EC2 | Google Compute Engine | Azure Virtual Machines | Not offered (Cloudflare Containers instead) |
| Serverless functions | AWS Lambda | Google Cloud Run functions | Azure Functions | Cloudflare Workers |
| Object storage | Amazon S3 | Google Cloud Storage | Azure Blob Storage | Cloudflare R2 |
| Managed SQL | Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL | Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL | Azure Database for PostgreSQL | Cloudflare D1 (SQLite) |
| NoSQL / key-value | Amazon DynamoDB | Firestore | Azure Cosmos DB | Workers KV |
| CDN | Amazon CloudFront | Google Cloud CDN | Azure Front Door | Cloudflare CDN |
Sizes are matched like for like. A medium server is an m6i.large on AWS, an n2-standard-2 on Google Cloud and a D2s v5 on Azure: each has 2 vCPU and 8 GB of memory on a comparable Intel generation. Databases are managed PostgreSQL on all three, sized the same way. Choose a size in the calculator to see the exact machine type priced on each cloud.
How do AWS, Google Cloud, Azure and Cloudflare compare on features?
Beyond the price per hour, these are the billing rules that move a monthly total the most:
| AWS | Google Cloud | Azure | Cloudflare | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Automatic discount for always-on VMs | None | Up to 20% on N2 (sustained use) | None | No VMs |
| Free internet egress each month | 100 GB | 100 GB from Cloud Storage and 1 GB from VMs (US regions) | 100 GB | No egress fees |
| Serverless billing | Duration per 1 ms × memory | Instance time per 100 ms (CPU + memory) | Duration × memory, 100 ms minimum | CPU time only |
| Always-free serverless | 1M requests, 400K GB-s | 2M requests, 180K vCPU-s | 1M executions, 400K GB-s | 100K requests a day |
| Always-free object storage | None | 5 GB in US regions | None | 10 GB, 1M writes, 10M reads |
| Disk billing | Per GB | Per GB | By size tier (rounded up) | No disks |
| Lowest entry price for SQL | $0.032/h (db.t4g.small) | $0.035/h (db-g1-small) | $0.017/h (B1ms) | $5/month plan (D1) |
| New-customer credit | $100 at sign-up, up to $100 more | $300 for 90 days | $200 for 30 days | None |
Free allowances shown are the ones every account gets each month. Sign-up credits run out, so the calculator never counts them.
How do two clouds compare head to head?
For a closer look at two clouds or two services, each head-to-head comparison prices both at three usage levels in all 12 regions and compares their features from official documentation:
- Clouds head to head: AWS vs Google Cloud · AWS vs Azure · Google Cloud vs Azure · AWS vs Cloudflare · Google Cloud vs Cloudflare · Azure vs Cloudflare
- Servers: Amazon EC2 vs Compute Engine · Amazon EC2 vs Azure Virtual Machines · Compute Engine vs Azure Virtual Machines
- Serverless: AWS Lambda vs Cloudflare Workers · AWS Lambda vs Google Cloud Run · AWS Lambda vs Azure Functions · Google Cloud Run vs Cloudflare Workers
- Object storage: Amazon S3 vs Cloudflare R2 · Amazon S3 vs Google Cloud Storage · Amazon S3 vs Azure Blob Storage · Google Cloud Storage vs Cloudflare R2
- SQL databases: Amazon RDS vs Google Cloud SQL · Amazon RDS vs Azure Database for PostgreSQL
- NoSQL databases: Amazon DynamoDB vs Firestore · Amazon DynamoDB vs Azure Cosmos DB
- CDN: Amazon CloudFront vs Cloudflare CDN
Where do these prices come from?
Every number comes from the provider's own published price list, read on October 14, 2026: the AWS Price List files, the Azure Retail Prices API, Google Cloud's pricing pages and Cloudflare's pricing documentation. Nothing is scraped from third-party sites, and each value was checked against a second official source where one exists.
- AWS: Amazon EC2 On-Demand pricing · AWS Lambda pricing · Amazon S3 pricing · Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL pricing · Amazon DynamoDB pricing · EC2 data transfer pricing · Amazon CloudFront pricing
- Google Cloud: Compute Engine VM pricing · Cloud Run pricing · Cloud Storage pricing · Cloud SQL pricing · Firestore pricing · Network (egress) pricing · Cloud CDN pricing
- Azure: Linux Virtual Machines pricing · Azure Functions pricing · Blob Storage pricing · Azure Database for PostgreSQL pricing · Cosmos DB serverless pricing · Bandwidth pricing · Azure Front Door pricing
- Cloudflare: Containers pricing · Workers pricing · R2 pricing · D1 pricing · Workers KV pricing · Cloudflare plans
Prices are in US dollars, on-demand, for Linux, with no commitments. Every figure on this page is generated from the same price snapshot as the calculator, and automated tests check each claim whenever the prices change. A month is 730 hours and 1 TB is 1,024 GB. Providers change prices from time to time, so for a purchase decision confirm the final figure in the provider's console.
What does this estimate leave out?
The calculator prices the services most apps are built from. A real invoice can also include:
- Taxes and support plans. VAT, GST or sales tax, and any paid support tier.
- Commitment discounts. Savings Plans, committed use discounts and reservations lower compute prices in exchange for a 1- or 3-year term. Every price here is on-demand.
- Networking extras. Load balancers in front of servers, NAT gateways, public IPv4 addresses and traffic between zones or regions.
- Operations. Logs, metrics, backups beyond the included amount, snapshots and container registries.
For most small and medium apps these are a modest share of the bill. If they are not, that is usually the first place we look in a cost review.
Want an engineer to check your real cloud bill?
A calculator shows list prices. A real bill also carries the costs nobody planned for: servers sized for a launch that never came, test environments left running, services that talk across zones, logs nobody reads. Finding those is our day job.
Playxoft designs, builds and runs production backends on AWS, Google Cloud, Azure or Cloudflare: real-time game services and messaging platforms on Google Cloud Run, player systems on AWS EC2 and Lambda, and edge services on Cloudflare Workers. We help teams:
- Choose the right cloud and architecture before the first bill, not after
- Cut an existing bill by rightsizing, committing where it pays and removing waste
- Migrate between clouds with a tested plan and no surprise downtime
- Deliver white-label cloud work for agencies and software studios, under your brand
Send us your architecture or last month's invoice and we will tell you, free and honestly, where the money goes and what we would change. Get a free cloud cost review or see our backend and cloud services.
Frequently asked questions
Last updated by the Playxoft engineering team.