List prices versus the price you actually pay

Por Rohit Athaide · Publicado el 3 nov 2026

A list price is the public price a vendor publishes for a service. It is the same for anyone who looks. The price on your invoice can be lower, and occasionally higher, for reasons that sit outside the price page.

Why the invoice can be lower

• Commitments. One or three year commitments lower the rate for the amount you commit. See reserved instances and savings plans.
• Spot capacity. Interruptible instances cost less. See spot and preemptible instances.
• Enterprise agreements. Large customers negotiate a discount on their total spend, sometimes in exchange for a minimum commitment.
• Partners and resellers. Buying through a reseller can bring a discount, a local currency invoice or extra support, and sometimes extra fees.
• Credits. Startup programs, marketing credits and migration funding reduce what you pay. They are a payment, not a price.
• Free allowances. Small amounts of some services cost nothing. See cloud free tiers.

Why it can be higher

• Tax. GST in India, VAT in Europe and sales tax elsewhere are added to the invoice.
• Support plans. A paid support plan is commonly a share of your monthly spend.
• Marketplace software. Third-party software bills on top of the infrastructure.
• Usage you did not plan for. Data transfer, logs, idle resources and retries.
• Exchange rates. A bill in rupees or euros follows the vendor’s rate on the day, which differs from any rate we show.

Why this site uses list prices

List prices are the one number that is public, the same for every reader and checkable against the vendor’s own page. A comparison on negotiated prices would need information only you have. A comparison on list prices has a plain meaning: here is what each cloud charges anyone, line by line.

That makes a list-price estimate a good ceiling for the services it covers, and a fair way to compare the shape of costs between clouds. It is not a forecast of your invoice.

How to use a list price well

1. Estimate on list prices to find the large cost drivers.
2. Ask each vendor for a quote if your spend is large enough for a discount to matter.
3. Compare the quotes on the same workload, not on the discount percentage alone. A big discount on a service you barely use is worth little.
4. Add what we leave out: tax, support and your own team’s time.

The rules we follow are laid out in how we calculate monthly cloud costs. For the models themselves, see cloud pricing models explained.