Cloud compute & VPS pricing compared
Virtual machines billed by the hour or by the month. Two pricing models coexist here: flat monthly plans with bundled traffic, and per-hour on-demand rates with metered egress on top. The second looks cheaper per vCPU and is usually not.
List prices checked
Rate cards
All 15 compute providers in the dataset, sorted by the axis this category is actually billed on.
| Service | Provider | Entry /mo | Egress /GB | Storage /GB-mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vultr Cloud Compute | Vultr | $2.50 | $0.010 | — |
| Hetzner Cloud | Hetzner | $3.79 | $0.0012 | — |
| DigitalOcean Droplets | DigitalOcean | $4.00 | $0.010 | — |
| Scaleway Instances | Scaleway | $4.20 | $0.010 | — |
| UpCloud | UpCloud | $5.00 | $0.010 | — |
| Linode (Akamai Cloud) | Akamai | $5.00 | $0.0050 | — |
| Oracle Cloud Compute | Oracle | — | $0.0085 | — |
| AWS EC2 | Amazon Web Services | — | $0.090 | — |
| Google Compute Engine | — | $0.120 | — | |
| Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft | — | $0.087 | — |
| AWS Lightsail | Amazon Web Services | $5.00 | $0.090 | — |
| Contabo VPS | Contabo | $5.50 | Free | — |
| DigitalOcean Kubernetes | DigitalOcean | $12.00 | $0.010 | — |
| IONOS Cloud Servers | IONOS | $4.00 | Free | — |
| OVHcloud VPS | OVHcloud | $4.20 | Free | — |
Ranked by real monthly cost: Growing SaaS
A funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers. Each provider's own published rates, applied to identical usage.
| # | Service | Monthly | Breakdown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Hetzner Cloud | $7.59 | Compute $7.59 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 2 | IONOS Cloud Servers | $8.00 | Compute $8.00 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 3 | OVHcloud VPS | $8.40 | Compute $8.40 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 4 | AWS Lightsail | $10 | Compute $10 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 5 | UpCloud | $11 | Compute $11 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 6 | Vultr Cloud Compute | $11 | Compute $5.84 · Data transfer out $5.00 |
| 7 | Linode (Akamai Cloud) | $11 | Compute $11 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 8 | Contabo VPS | $11 | Compute $11 · Data transfer out $0 |
| 9 | DigitalOcean Droplets | $14 | Compute $8.69 · Data transfer out $5.00 |
| 10 | Scaleway Instances | $19 | Compute $8.76 · Data transfer out $10 |
| 11 | Oracle Cloud Compute | $23 | Compute $15 · Data transfer out $8.50 |
| 12 | DigitalOcean Kubernetes | $34 | Compute $24 · Data transfer out $10 |
| 13 | AWS EC2 | $151 | Compute $61 · Data transfer out $90 |
| 14 | Azure Virtual Machines | $163 | Compute $76 · Data transfer out $87 |
| 15 | Google Compute Engine | $189 | Compute $69 · Data transfer out $120 |
Excludes committed-use discounts, regional variation, and per-request charges. Services that do not publish a rate for every axis this category bills on are listed last rather than shown as cheap.
Questions
- What is the cheapest compute provider in 2026?
- For the "Growing SaaS" workload — a funded product serving a few thousand daily users, with an image-heavy frontend and two application servers. — Hetzner Cloud comes out cheapest at $7.59 per month on published list prices. Ranked purely on the headline rate the order is different, which is why both tables are on this page.
- What does an always-on server actually cost per month once bandwidth is included?
- The second table answers it directly: it applies each provider's published rates to one identical workload and ranks by the resulting monthly bill. Change the workload and the ranking changes — that is the point, and it is why a single "best" list is usually wrong.
- Are these cloud compute & vps prices current?
- Each row is stamped with the month it was last checked against the provider's own pricing page, and every service page links straight to that page. Providers change list prices without notice, so treat these as a starting point and confirm before you commit.