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 pricing pages — the AWS Pricing API (pricing.us-east-1.amazonaws.com), the GCP pricing calculator, the Azure Retail Prices API (prices.azure.com), OCI's pricing page (apexapps.oracle.com), and DigitalOcean's pricing page — 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.
August 2026 snapshot highlights
Our pricing history now covers four snapshots: November 2025, May 2026, June 2026, and August 2026. Here's what stood out in this round of verification.
AWS — unchanged across the board
AWS has been the most stable provider in our dataset. Every compute rate we track — t2.micro at $0.0116/hr, m5.large at $0.096/hr, m5.xlarge at $0.192/hr — has been identical across all four snapshots. The RDS db.t3.small briefly read as $0.036/hr in our May 2026 snapshot before we corrected it back to $0.034/hr in June after re-verification. It remains at $0.034/hr in August. The RDS db.r5.large has held at $0.24/hr since November 2025, and the Application Load Balancer has been $0.0225/hr throughout.
GCP — compute up sharply since late 2025, database mixed
The most significant move in our dataset is GCP's e2-medium: $0.0335/hr in November 2025, rising to $0.0553/hr by May 2026 — a 65% increase — and holding there through August. The n2-standard-4 has been stable at $0.194/hr.
The database picture is more mixed. The Cloud SQL db-f1-micro went the opposite direction: from $0.0335/hr in November 2025 to $0.0105/hr in May 2026 (a 69% drop), reflecting a change in how GCP prices shared-core SQL instances. The Cloud SQL db-n1-standard-2 moved upward from $0.184/hr to $0.1917/hr in May, then dropped significantly to $0.1351/hr in June, where it remains in August. GCP had the most cross-category movement of any provider in our history.
Azure — D4s_v3 corrected down; SQL tiers held
The headline in this August snapshot is the Standard_D4s_v3. In June 2026 we recorded it at $0.376/hr — a rate that looked anomalous. This month the Azure Retail Prices API confirms the correct current list price is $0.192/hr, which is consistent with our November 2025 and May 2026 readings. The June figure was a data error on our part, now corrected.
Azure SQL Database pricing shifted significantly between November 2025 and May 2026. SQL Basic dropped from $0.015/hr to $0.0068/hr (a 55% decrease reflecting updated DTU pricing), and SQL Standard S2 moved from $0.15/hr to $0.1008/hr (−33%). Both have been stable since May and remain at those rates in August.
OCI — per-unit rates stable
OCI's per-unit compute rates are confirmed unchanged in August (verified via the OCI Pricing API): $0.025/OCPU-hr and $0.0015/GB-hr for E4.Flex shapes. Our E4.Flex reference config — 2 OCPU + 16 GB — prices out at $0.074/hr in both June and August.
The Autonomous Database figure warrants context. The jump from $0.1614/hr (May) to $0.789/hr (June, carried forward to August) reflects OCI's migration from OCPU-based to ECPU-based billing for Autonomous DB, not a straight price increase. Our June reference config uses 2 ECPUs at $0.336/ECPU-hr plus storage — a genuinely different shape than the May entry. We document this in the snapshot descriptions so the number isn't misread as a 4x rate hike.
DigitalOcean — compute increase in June, stable since
DigitalOcean held its prices flat from November 2025 through May 2026, then raised compute Droplet prices 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%). Managed database and load balancer prices were unchanged. In August, all DigitalOcean rates carry forward from June — no further movement detected.
What this means for cloud budgets
The provider-level patterns that emerge from our four snapshots:
AWS is the most predictable: the rates you plan against today are very likely to be the rates you pay three months from now. That stability is genuinely useful for long-horizon planning.
GCP has moved prices in both directions, and the movements have been large. A 65% compute increase and a 69% database decrease in the same provider across the same period means GCP-heavy workloads need more frequent re-verification than AWS-heavy ones. The savings on small shared-core SQL instances are real, but they're offset by higher e2-medium compute costs for teams running general-purpose compute at that tier.
Azure showed the most apparent volatility, though much of it was measurement noise rather than actual price changes — the June D4s_v3 anomaly being the clearest example. The real Azure story is the SQL tier repricing in early 2026: teams on Azure SQL Basic and Standard S2 are paying meaningfully less than they were in late 2025.
OCI continues to offer competitive per-unit compute rates, and the per-unit pricing hasn't moved. The billing model for Autonomous DB changed, which matters for teams comparing OCI database costs against alternatives — you need to use the ECPU-based numbers, not the older OCPU-based ones.
DigitalOcean held prices flat longer than any other provider in this dataset, then raised compute prices across the board in a single move. The increases were consistent (roughly 8–10% across Droplet tiers) and have held steady since.
The simulation lets you model the cost impact of any of these changes against your specific architecture — not a generic benchmark. If your stack runs eight m5.large instances and two RDS db.r5.large instances, you can run the current rates against your traffic profile and see what a hypothetical 10% AWS compute increase would do to your monthly bill before it happens.
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.