CloudCostCompareHow to use the price catalog: filters, sources and limits
The price catalog lists vendor SKUs one at a time, with filters, so you can look up a specific instance or storage class instead of estimating a whole workload. This guide covers what is in it and what is not.
What is in it
Four categories, for AWS only so far:
| Category | What a row is |
|---|---|
| Virtual machines | An on-demand Linux instance on shared hardware |
| GPU accelerators | An instance with GPUs or other accelerators |
| Storage | A block volume type or an object storage class, per gigabyte-month |
| Managed databases | A PostgreSQL instance size, and database volume prices |
Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle are not in the catalog yet, because their price feeds do not give vCPU and memory for each size. The status page says what each cloud holds and what is missing. Their absence is a gap in our catalog, not a statement that they lack the service.
Two region groups
Each category is available for US East and for India. A region group pairs the closest equivalent region on each cloud, and it is chosen with a drop-down on each table. Prices differ by region. See why cloud prices differ by region.
The filters
On the virtual machine and GPU tables:
- Name or family: matches part of the instance name or its family label.
- vCPU at least / at most and memory at least: set minimums, and rows with an unknown size are left out, because they cannot be shown to meet the limit.
- Architecture: x86_64 or arm64, worked out from the processor name.
- GPUs at least: on the GPU table, counting fractional GPUs.
- Deployment: Single-AZ or Multi-AZ, on the database table.
- Currency: US dollars or Indian rupees.
Sort by monthly price, vCPU, memory or name by clicking a column heading. The table shows 50 rows per page.
Reading a row
Each row shows the vendor’s own name for the SKU, its size attributes, the price per hour and the monthly price, and a source link to the vendor’s price list with the date it was read. Instances are priced per hour, and the monthly figure is the hourly price times 730 hours. Storage rows are priced per gigabyte-month, with no monthly figure. A price that the vendor does not publish is shown as empty, never as zero.
What is deliberately left out
- Requests, retrieval, data transfer, snapshots and provisioned IOPS on the storage and database tables. The page says so.
- Windows and licensed software, reserved prices and spot prices.
- Other database engines than PostgreSQL, and Aurora.
- Free allowances and tax.
See list prices versus the price you actually pay for what that means for a real bill.
Exporting
Each table has a Download CSV button. The file holds the rows your filters currently show, with the source and date on every row. Details are in exporting estimates, FOCUS and CSV.
Related tools
- The Terraform plan estimator uses the same catalog to price a plan. See pricing a Terraform plan.
- The change log lists SKUs added, removed or changed in price each week.
- The same data is available as JSON. See the price API and MCP server.
To find a good size in the first place, read choosing a cloud VM size. To learn how the numbers get here, read how prices are collected and refreshed.