AWS and Azure Cloud Pricing Moving in Different Directions, as Shown by Liftr Insights Data

Liftr Insights data highlights increases in AWS prices while Microsoft Azure prices have been decreasing.

Liftr Insights, a pioneer in market intelligence driven by unique data, reveals a trend in increasing prices for AWS while Microsoft Azure has gone in the opposite direction over 4 years.

Over the past year, there has been a 23.0% increase in average prices of on-demand compute instances at AWS. Liftr Insights data show that not only did AWS increase their average prices in 2020, 2021, and 2022, but the increases have been higher each year since 2019.

In comparison, Liftr Insights data show a decline of 9.1% for Azure on-demand compute prices in 2022. While Azure price increases in 2020 were higher than those of AWS, Azure’s increases were lower than AWS in 2021 and now show a net decrease for 2022.

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“Finding trends like this is a key value-prop,” says Tab Schadt, CEO of Liftr Insights. “We got into this business of tracking data because the cloud providers are opaque. These are objective insights that are hard to find elsewhere.”

Across the cloud providers tracked by Liftr Insights, representing over 75% of the public cloud market, average prices for on-demand instances increased 2.5%. This means that AWS has been a driving factor in those higher prices.

Many factors influence average price changes, including new regions, new products, different types of products, such as high-performance instances and instances with higher core counts, which both tend to carry higher price tags.

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Despite all these increases and decreases in prices, Azure prices have been higher (on average) than AWS prices for three years. These data points provide more insights into cloud providers strategies.

“Our data provides the ability for market intelligence analysts to drill down to see what is driving these changes,” says Schadt. “But, the areas of change are not always what was expected. Finding unexpected changes and driving factors is not only interesting, it’s invaluable.”