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Provider comparison · Updated 2026-09-20

AWS vs GCP Cost Comparison

Side-by-side pricing including compute, egress, storage, load balancer, managed database, and the hidden costs that don't show up in basic estimates. All prices are on-demand, monthly, in USD.

Amazon Web Services
Market leader. Most features, highest hidden costs.
Complexity: high★★★★★
Google Cloud Platform
Strong in AI/ML and data. Competitive egress pricing.
Complexity: high★★★★☆

Compute pricing (on-demand, monthly)

TierAWSGCPGCP saves
Nano (1 vCPU / 512 MB)
t3.nano / e2-micro
$3.80/mo$5.55/mo+46% more
Micro (1 vCPU / 1 GB)
t3.micro / e2-small
$7.59/mo$9.78/mo+29% more
Small (2 vCPU / 4 GB)
t3.medium / e2-standard-2
$30.37/mo$48.91/mo+61% more
Medium (4 vCPU / 16 GB)
m7i.xlarge / n2-standard-4
$147.17/mo$141.77/mo4% cheaper
Large (8 vCPU / 32 GB)
m7i.2xlarge / n2-standard-8
$294.34/mo$283.46/mo4% cheaper
XLarge (16 vCPU / 64 GB)
m7i.4xlarge / e2-standard-16
$588.67/mo$391.28/mo34% cheaper

Egress cost - the surprise bill item

Data transferred out to the internet per month.AWS free tier: 100GB/month. After that: $0.09/GB.

Data out / monthAWSGCPDifference
10 GBFreeFree-
100 GBFreeFree-
500 GB$36$26GCP saves $10
1 TB$81$68GCP saves $13
5 TB$441$332GCP saves $109

Managed services pricing

Object Storage
AWS
$0.023/GB/mo
GCP
$0.020/GB/mo

Cloud Storage Standard.

Load Balancer
AWS
~$16/mo
GCP
~$18/mo

HTTP(S) Load Balancer: $0.025/hour for forwarding rules.

Managed PostgreSQL
AWS
~$14/mo
GCP
~$9/mo

Cloud SQL. f1-micro is not production-ready.

Hidden costs to watch for

NAT Gatewaycritical$32 to $100+/mo

Required for private subnet instances to reach the internet. $0.045/hour + $0.045/GB processed.

How to avoid: Use VPC endpoints for AWS services. Put dev workloads in public subnets. Or switch to a provider that does not charge for this.

Inter-AZ Data Transferhigh$10 to $200+/mo

$0.01/GB each way between Availability Zones. Multi-AZ setups silently double your data transfer costs.

How to avoid: Co-locate services in the same AZ for dev. Use endpoint services to reduce cross-AZ calls.

Egress to Internetcritical$9 to $900+ per 100 GB/mo

$0.09/GB out after 100 GB free. APIs serving large payloads or media can generate hundreds in egress fees.

How to avoid: Use CloudFront (first 1 TB/month free). Or switch to DigitalOcean with included bandwidth.

RDS Multi-AZmedium2x your RDS bill/mo

Multi-AZ RDS doubles your database cost. Many developers enable this in production without realizing the cost impact.

How to avoid: Use single-AZ for dev/staging. Consider managed Postgres alternatives like Neon or Supabase.

CloudWatch Logsmedium$10 to $200+/mo

$0.50/GB ingested + $0.03/GB stored/month. High-traffic apps with verbose logging can spend $50-200/month just on logs.

How to avoid: Set log retention policies. Use log sampling. Or export to S3 and use Athena instead.

Egress to Internet (GCP)medium$8 to $80 per 100 GB/mo

$0.085/GB for first 1 TB (after 200 GB free) to non-Google destinations. Better than AWS but still significant.

How to avoid: Enable Cloud CDN to reduce origin egress. Use Google's global network for intra-region transfers.

Calculate for your specific workload

The numbers above are for reference. Plug in your actual requirements to get a real cost estimate.

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