August 6, 2026
Cloud Pricing Trends: August 2026
Cloud prices aren't static — and most simulators treat them as if they are. We maintain a verified, provider-by-provider pricing history so our simulations are always grounded in what you'd actually be charged today.
Why we track pricing history
Simulation accuracy starts with correct inputs. If the hourly rate for an RDS instance in our model drifts from the published AWS price, every cost estimate we produce is wrong — and it compounds across architectures. A 5% error on a single resource becomes a 20% error on a multi-tier stack that uses eight of them.
So we verify rates against official provider sources — the AWS Pricing API, the GCP Cloud Billing Catalog API, the Azure Retail Prices API, OCI's Pricing API, and DigitalOcean's Sizes API — on a monthly cadence. When a rate changes, we add a new snapshot to our pricing history rather than silently overwriting the old one. That record lets us show you trends, not just current prices.
We publish this history openly at /pricing-history. If you're evaluating a cloud migration decision or modeling a multi-year infrastructure budget, that page shows exactly how prices have moved for each shape we track.
What we track
Our history covers five providers: AWS (us-east-1), GCP (us-central1), Azure (East US), OCI (us-ashburn-1), and DigitalOcean (nyc3). Across those providers we track 33 canonical resources across four categories: compute, database, storage, and network.
We use the same shapes each snapshot — t2.micro, m5.large, m5.xlarge, e2-medium, n2-standard-4, Standard_B2s, Standard_D4s_v3, VM.Standard.E4.Flex, and so on — so comparisons are apples-to-apples across time. If a provider changes its pricing model (switching from OCPU-based to ECPU-based billing, for example), we document the methodology change alongside the rate so neither number is misread as a pure price movement.
The headline: stability, with two real exceptions
Our pricing history now covers four snapshots: November 2025, May 2026, June 2026, and August 2026. The most striking finding is how little has actually moved. Across 33 tracked resources and five providers, the vast majority of rates are identical today to what they were nine months ago. The two genuine exceptions are a GCP database price reduction and a DigitalOcean compute increase, both from June 2026.
Provider snapshots
AWS — unchanged across the board
AWS has been the most stable provider in our dataset. Every rate we track has been consistent across all four snapshots: t2.micro at $0.0116/hr, m5.large at $0.096/hr, m5.xlarge at $0.192/hr, RDS db.t3.small at $0.034/hr, RDS db.r5.large at $0.24/hr, and the Application Load Balancer at $0.0225/hr. No movement detected in August.
GCP — stable compute; real database cost reduction
GCP compute rates have been flat throughout our tracking period: e2-medium at $0.0553/hr (2 vCPU × $0.021811 + 4 GB × $0.002923, verified via the Cloud Billing Catalog API), n2-standard-4 at $0.194/hr, and Cloud SQL db-f1-micro at $0.0105/hr. The n2-standard-4 and load balancer ($0.025/hr per forwarding rule) are also unchanged.
The one real movement: Cloud SQL db-n1-standard-2 dropped from $0.184/hr in November 2025 to $0.1351/hr starting in June 2026. This is a genuine price reduction driven by GCP's introduction of a bundled “2 vCPU + 7.5 GB” SKU, confirmed via the Cloud Billing Catalog API (service 9662-B51E-5089). Teams running Cloud SQL at that tier are paying meaningfully less than they were a year ago. That rate holds in August.
Azure — stable throughout
Azure prices have been consistent across all snapshots. Standard_B2s holds at $0.0416/hr, Standard_D4s_v3 at $0.192/hr (verified August 2026 against the Azure Retail Prices API), SQL Basic at $0.0068/hr (~$4.90/mo), and SQL Standard S2 at $0.1008/hr (~$73.58/mo). Blob Storage ($0.018/hr) and the Load Balancer ($0.025/hr) are also unchanged. No rate movements detected in August.
OCI — stable compute rates; billing model note for Autonomous DB
OCI's per-unit compute rates are unchanged in August: $0.025/OCPU-hr and $0.0015/GB-hr for E4.Flex shapes. Our standard reference config — 2 OCPU + 16 GB — prices out at $0.074/hr, consistent across all four snapshots. Object Storage, Block Volume, File Storage, and the Load Balancer are also unchanged.
One figure warrants context: Autonomous Database at $0.789/hr. This reflects OCI's ECPU-based billing — our reference config is 2 ECPUs at $0.336/ECPU-hr plus storage. OCI migrated Autonomous DB from OCPU to ECPU billing in 2024, so any comparison against pre-migration figures needs to account for the different billing unit, not just the rate. Our snapshots all use the ECPU config consistently, so the trend line is apples-to-apples.
DigitalOcean — flat through May, then a broad compute increase
DigitalOcean held its Droplet prices flat from November 2025 through May 2026, then raised compute rates across the board in June. The s-1vcpu-1gb moved from $6.00/mo to $6.52/mo (+8.7%), the s-2vcpu-4gb from $24.00/mo to $26.07/mo (+8.6%), and the CPU-Optimized c-4 from $83.00/mo to $91.25/mo (+9.9%). All three increases are confirmed against the DO Sizes API (/v2/sizes, verified 2026-08-06). Managed database pricing ($15/mo and $60/mo) and the Load Balancer ($12/mo) were not affected. In August, all rates carry forward from June — no further movement.
What this means for cloud budgets
The dominant story in this dataset is stability. If you built a cost model against these providers nine months ago using accurate list prices, your model is almost certainly still correct — with two exceptions worth adjusting for.
If you run Cloud SQL db-n1-standard-2 on GCP, you should be seeing lower bills since June. The $0.184 → $0.1351/hr reduction is a 27% drop for that specific tier. If your cost model hasn't been updated, it's overstating your GCP database spend.
If you run DigitalOcean Droplets, compute costs increased roughly 8–10% in June and have held there. The increase applied uniformly across tiers, so the relative economics between Droplet sizes haven't changed — but absolute costs are higher than any model built before June would reflect.
For AWS, Azure, and OCI compute, list prices have been flat. The stability is genuine and useful for long-horizon planning: you can model a 12-month infrastructure budget with reasonable confidence that today's rates will still be the rates you pay next quarter.
The simulation lets you model the cost impact of any of these movements against your specific architecture — not a generic benchmark. If your stack runs eight m5.large instances alongside Cloud SQL, you can update to current rates and see exactly what changed and what didn't.
We update our pricing history each month and publish the full snapshot record at /pricing-history. To model what the current rates mean for your architecture, start a simulation at /simulate.