Cloud costs in India: regions, rupee pricing and what estimates leave out
If your factories, users or data need to stay in India, all three major clouds have regions here. Prices in Indian regions are often different from US regions, sometimes higher, sometimes lower, and the differences vary by service.
The Indian regions we compare
| Cloud | Region | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Azure | Central India (centralindia) |
Pune |
| Amazon Web Services | Asia Pacific (Mumbai) (ap-south-1) |
Mumbai |
| Google Cloud | asia-south1 |
Mumbai |
Each cloud has more Indian regions than these (for example Azure South India, AWS Hyderabad and Google Cloud Delhi), but not every service is available in every region. We use the region on each cloud with the widest range of services, so the comparison is like-for-like.
India vs US prices
Cloud list prices are set per region. For the services in our Industry 4.0 workload, most price lines in Indian regions cost more than in US East, typically 5–20% more, with a few lines up to around 40% more. A handful cost the same, and one or two are cheaper, so the gap varies by service and by cloud.
You can see this directly: the estimator lets you switch between India and US East with the same inputs. If you have no legal or latency reason to keep data in India, the difference is worth checking. If you do (see below), compare clouds within India rather than India against the US.
How rupee prices are worked out
All three vendors publish their price lists in US dollars, and that’s what we fetch. To show rupees, we convert with one exchange rate for every cloud, so the conversion can’t favour any vendor. The rate is the European Central Bank’s reference rate, updated daily. The methodology page shows today’s rate.
Your actual rupee bill may differ slightly because:
- Vendors that bill in rupees set their own rupee prices, which don’t track the daily rate exactly;
- If you’re billed in dollars, your bank or card applies its own exchange rate and fees.
What to add before you budget
- GST. Cloud services bought in India are subject to GST (18% at the time of writing). Registered businesses can usually claim it back as input tax credit, but it affects cash flow. Our estimates exclude all taxes.
- Data transfer out. Sending data out of the cloud to the internet, or between regions, is charged separately and isn’t in our estimates.
- Support plans. Business-grade support is a separate subscription on all three clouds.
Data residency
India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 governs how personal data is handled, and some sectors (such as finance, through RBI rules) have stricter rules on where data is stored. Machine telemetry is usually not personal data, but data linked to operators or employees can be. If residency matters for you, take advice and confirm that every service in your design is deployed in an Indian region, including backups and analytics.