AUSTIN, Texas – AWS costs are going up while Azure costs are doing down, according to new research released by Austin-based Liftr Insights. Yet Azure prices have been higher on average than AWS prices for three years, the report also says.

Over the past year, there has been a 23.0% increase in average prices of on-demand compute instances at AWS, according to Liftr, with the increases themselves increasing each year since 2019. 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, the report's data shows 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, Liftr says.

"We got into this business of tracking data because the cloud providers are opaque,” according to company CEO Tod Schadt. “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.”

Photograph from Amazon.