Hot-tier storage prices at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud sit within 15 percent of each other. Nobody's storage bill is actually decided by that number. It's decided by egress, retrieval fees, and API requests, the three line items every pricing page buries below the headline rate.
Hot-tier storage prices at AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud sit within 15 percent of each other as of mid-2026. Nobody's storage bill is actually decided by that number. It's decided by egress, retrieval fees, and API requests, the three line items every pricing page buries below the headline rate, and where the real differences between these three platforms actually live.
This guide compares every relevant storage tier across all three hyperscalers using their current published 2026 rates, then walks through what actually drives real-world bills. Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud data puts wasted IaaS and PaaS spend at 29 percent this year, and storage is one of the most fixable places to claw that back, if you know where to look.
The at-rest, per-gigabyte rate is the number everyone compares first, and the number that matters least on its own.
| Tier | AWS S3 | Azure Blob | Google Cloud Storage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hot / Standard | $0.023/GB | $0.018/GB | $0.020/GB |
| Cool / Nearline | N/A (use IA) | $0.010/GB | $0.010/GB (regional) |
| Cold / Coldline | $0.0125/GB (Std-IA) | $0.0045/GB | $0.004/GB |
| Archive | $0.00099/GB (Deep Archive) | $0.00099/GB | $0.0012/GB (regional) |
AWS S3 Standard runs $0.023 per GB for the first 50 TB, stepping down to $0.022 for the next 450 TB and $0.021 above 500 TB. Azure Blob Hot sits lowest of the three at $0.018 per GB, with Cool, Cold, and Archive tiers stepping down to $0.010, $0.0045, and $0.00099 respectively. Google Cloud Storage Standard runs $0.020 per GB, in between the other two, with two notable 2026 pricing shifts: multi-region Nearline rose from $0.010 to $0.015 per GB, while multi-region Archive was cut from $0.004 to $0.0024 per GB. None of the three wins outright on storage price alone, the spread across hot tiers is close enough that it rarely should be the deciding factor by itself.
This is where the three platforms actually diverge, and where most cost surprises originate.
AWS charges $0.09 per GB for internet egress, with the first 100 GB each month free. Azure charges $0.087 per GB with no comparable free monthly allowance in its standard terms. Google Cloud charges $0.12 per GB, the highest of the three, roughly 33 percent more than AWS and 38 percent more than Azure, though its Always Free tier includes 100 GiB of egress from North America. On a 10 TB monthly egress workload, that gap alone is the difference between roughly $900 a month on AWS and $1,200 a month on Google Cloud.
AWS charges $0.005 per 1,000 PUT requests and $0.0004 per 1,000 GET requests. Google Cloud makes Class A, B, and C operations free for pay-as-you-go customers, charging only for Class D transactions at $0.004 per 10,000 calls, with the first 2,500 calls each day free. Azure's request pricing carries a sharp trap: Cool tier read operations cost $0.01 per 10,000 requests, roughly 25 times more expensive than Hot tier reads. A workload that moves data to Cool tier expecting savings, then gets accessed more than planned, can see operation charges erase the storage discount entirely.
All three platforms charge separately to retrieve data out of their cold and archive classes, and for access-heavy workloads these retrieval charges can exceed the raw storage savings that made the cold tier attractive in the first place. Map your actual read pattern before assuming a colder tier will be cheaper overall.
Every platform enforces rules that only show up after you've already committed data to a tier, and all three penalize early deletion or small files differently.
| Provider | Minimum Duration | Small Object Rule |
|---|---|---|
| AWS S3 | 30 days (Standard-IA), 180 days (Glacier Deep Archive) | No explicit minimum billable size |
| Azure Blob | No fixed minimum duration by tier | 128 KiB minimum billable size on Cool, Cold, Archive |
| Google Cloud Storage | 30 days (Nearline), 90 days (Coldline), 365 days (Archive) | No explicit minimum billable size |
Google Cloud's 365-day minimum on Archive is the longest commitment of the three by a wide margin, worth flagging specifically if data might need to move or delete before a full year passes. Azure's 128 KiB minimum billable object size means a large volume of small files stored in Cool, Cold, or Archive tiers gets billed at a higher effective rate than their actual size, a detail that matters more than it first appears for workloads with many small objects.
The three platforms differ meaningfully in how many storage classes they offer and how automatically they manage tier transitions.
AWS offers eight classes: Express One Zone, Standard, Intelligent-Tiering, Standard-IA, One Zone-IA, Glacier Instant Retrieval, Glacier Flexible Retrieval, and Glacier Deep Archive, the widest selection of the three, with Intelligent-Tiering automatically moving data between tiers based on access patterns without manual lifecycle rules.
Google Cloud offers four classes: Standard, Nearline, Coldline, and Archive, a simpler model, with Autoclass managing tier transitions automatically with zero configuration required, a comparable capability to AWS Intelligent-Tiering with less setup.
Azure offers four tiers: Hot, Cool, Cold, and Archive, with lifecycle management policies available for automated tiering, though requiring more manual policy configuration than GCS Autoclass.
On API compatibility: AWS S3's API has become the de facto industry standard, and every backup tool, data pipeline, and deployment script in the ecosystem assumes it. Google Cloud Storage offers an S3 interoperability mode, though some advanced S3 features like certain bucket policies and lifecycle configurations don't map cleanly. Azure Blob Storage has the most limited S3 compatibility of the three, running its own REST API and SDK that work differently enough that migration tooling built for S3 often needs real rework to target Azure.
None of the three wins outright, and that's not a hedge, it's the honest conclusion every serious comparison of these platforms reaches. Hot-tier prices sit close enough together that the cheapest option in practice is usually whichever cloud your compute workloads already run on, since that avoids the egress charges that dominate real bills far more than the per-gigabyte storage rate does.
The per-gigabyte price on the pricing page is the smallest number in the equation. Egress, retrieval, and requests are where the real bill gets written.
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