AWS Monthly Cost Estimator 2026

A basic production setup — 2 application servers (t3.medium), 1 managed database (db.t3.medium), 100GB S3 storage and reasonable data transfer — typically runs £80–200/month. Adding a staging environment roughly doubles the bill. Costs scale significantly with traffic (data transfer), more powerful instances, additional managed services (ElasticSearch, SQS, SES) and multiple regions. Most early-stage UK SaaS startups spend £100–500/month on AWS.

Key cost reduction strategies: (1) purchase Reserved Instances for predictable compute workloads — 1-year no-upfront saves ~20%, 1-year all-upfront saves ~30%; (2) enable Compute Savings Plans for flexibility across instance types; (3) use Spot instances for development, batch jobs and non-critical workloads (up to 90% savings); (4) review and minimise data transfer costs — placing CloudFront in front of your app can significantly reduce EC2 data transfer charges; (5) delete unused EBS volumes, old snapshots and idle load balancers.

Costs are broadly comparable for equivalent compute and storage. Azure is often preferred for Microsoft-stack shops (Windows Server, SQL Server, .NET) where Azure Hybrid Benefit provides significant licensing savings. GCP is competitive on Kubernetes/ML workloads and offers sustained use discounts automatically without reservation commitments. AWS has the widest service breadth and largest UK startup ecosystem support, including AWS Activate credits for eligible startups. Real-world cost depends heavily on your architecture choices.