Cloud Storage Prices Drop Again as AWS and Google Cloud Cut Rates
Standard cloud storage now costs about 12 percent less than it did a year ago, and the two biggest providers are undercutting each other on price for the third time in 2026.
By Mara Voss, Technology
· 2 min read · Updated
Key Takeaways
- •AWS cut standard cloud storage to $0.021 per GB per month on September 8, its second cut of 2026.
- •Google Cloud's equivalent tier is now priced about 5 percent lower than AWS's, at $0.020 per GB per month.
- •The cuts apply only to standard storage tiers; archive and cold storage pricing has not changed since early 2025.
- •A 500 terabyte workload now costs roughly $16,800 less per year at AWS's new rate compared with September 2025 pricing.
Amazon Web Services cut its standard cloud storage price to $0.021 per gigabyte per month on September 8, matching a move Google Cloud made eleven days earlier. It is the third price cut from a major cloud provider in 2026, and it puts standard storage roughly 12 percent cheaper than it was in September 2025.
For a mid-size company storing 500 terabytes of data, the new AWS rate works out to about $10,500 a month, down from roughly $11,900 under last year's pricing. That is a $16,800 annual difference for a workload that has not changed at all.
Why the price war is happening now
The Short Answer
AWS and Google Cloud have each cut standard storage prices twice in 2026 as they compete for large enterprise contracts shifting between providers. The cuts do not apply to archival or cold storage tiers, and egress fees, the cost of moving data out, have stayed flat at both companies.
The discounts are concentrated in standard, frequently accessed storage tiers, the kind used for active application data rather than backups. Cold storage and archive tiers, where AWS's Glacier and Google's Archive class live, have not moved in price since early 2025.
$0.021
AWS standard storage price per GB, per month (down from $0.023)
Google Cloud's equivalent tier sits at $0.020 per GB per month as of September 8, a gap of roughly 5 percent.
Microsoft Azure has not matched either cut as of this week. A Microsoft spokesperson said in a September 12 email that the company reviews pricing on a regular cadence but declined to say whether a change is planned.
“The moment two of the big three cut storage prices twice in one year, that is not a promotion, that is a market that has stopped growing as fast as it used to.”
What this means for you
If your company stores data in AWS or Google Cloud's standard tier, the discount applies automatically to future billing cycles, no request required. If you are on Azure, this is a reasonable moment to ask your account rep for a matching rate, since providers are historically slower to raise prices back up than they are to cut them.
The bigger signal is what this says about cloud growth. When storage pricing was scarcely competitive, in 2021 and 2022, providers competed on features, not price. Two price cuts in one year from the two largest providers suggests storage has become commodity infrastructure that companies now shop on cost.
- cloud computing
- AWS
- Google Cloud
- enterprise IT
- pricing
Sources
- 01AWS Storage Pricing Update, Amazon Web Servicesaws.amazon.com
- 02Google Cloud Storage Pricing, Google Cloudcloud.google.com
- 03Cloud Infrastructure Market Note, Q3 2026, Vantage Research Groupexample.com
Corrections
No corrections have been made to this article.
About the reporter
Technology Reporter, Trestlewire
I spent seven years as a product manager at a mid-size SaaS company before switching sides to cover the industry that used to sign my paychecks. That means I have sat in the roadmap meetings, and I know the difference between a feature that ships and a slide that gets a demo clap.
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