Cloud price history

Direct answer

Cloud prices fell substantially, but they did not follow a stable “halve every two years” path. Early competition produced large step changes; mature core meters often plateaued. Recent gains are more likely to require moving to a new instance generation, architecture, storage class, or commitment model than waiting for an old SKU to become cheaper automatically.

What actually halved—and how slowly

The values come from long_run_metrics.csv. Inflation-adjusted figures are published separately; they do not correct for cross-generation performance.

Four different histories

Compute: price cuts became migration work

AWS same-advertised-capacity compute fell rapidly through 2017, then roughly plateaued: m4.large was $0.108/h, m5.large and m6i.large $0.096, m7i.large $0.1008, and m8i.large $0.10584. Price-performance improved, but realizing it required moving generation and validating the workload.

Alibaba’s monthly and PAYG curves diverged. A 2C8G monthly shape fell only 21% from 2016 to 2026, while PAYG fell 62.1%. Much of the latter was a narrowing of the elasticity premium: a full PAYG month went from 3.17× monthly to 1.52×.

Object storage: closest to hardware—then a ten-year plateau

S3 Standard’s first tier fell from $0.15 in 2006 to $0.023 in 2016, then stayed nominally flat through the snapshot. Alibaba OSS Standard moved from ¥0.30 in 2014 to a ¥0.12 directory rate; a durable public effective rate of ¥0.09 appeared in 2024. The large early fall did not remove request, retrieval, minimum-duration, or egress meters.

Block storage: capacity plateau, performance-density gain

EBS gp2 to gp3 reduced capacity price only 20%. For a 200 GiB volume, however, baseline IOPS rose from 600 to 3,000, so price per baseline IOPS fell 84%. Alibaba’s 2016 SSD and 2026 ESSD PL1 both anchor at ¥1/GB-month; product semantics and performance changed even though the capacity meter did not.

Egress: the least silicon-like meter

AWS first-paid-tier egress reached $0.09/GB in 2014 and then remained flat; the 2021 free allowance improved small-account average cost but not large-volume marginal cost. Alibaba ECS Hangzhou egress stayed at ¥0.8/GB across the 2016–2026 anchors. Path engineering—CDN, private connectivity, caching, regional placement, or self-hosted transit—matters more than waiting.

Full bills move slower than headline compute

The capacity basket is approximately 2 vCPU / 8 GiB compute + 200 GB/GiB general block storage + 1 TiB monthly internet egress, plus current AWS public IPv4. It is a capacity comparison, not a performance or SLA comparison.

In the 2026 AWS basket, egress is 46.2% of the bill—larger than compute at 42.9%. In the Alibaba monthly basket, unchanged egress is 65.1%. A workload’s bill weights decide whether a new compute generation matters.

Budgeting and FinOps implications

1. Do not budget automatic 10–20% annual list-price cuts for mature core SKUs.
2. Benchmark new generations every two to three years; migrate first, commit second.
3. Keep separate budgets for compute, storage capacity, storage performance, object activity, and network paths.
4. Preserve public price as the contract anchor, but plan using invoice-level effective rates and commitment waste.
5. Model high-egress workloads independently; their economics are not governed by the compute curve.
6. For self-hosting, hardware also arrives in steps. New server purchases capture technology gains only at refresh time, while facilities, power, and network set a floor.

Boundaries

• Public price is not enterprise net price.
• Same-advertised-capacity generations are not performance-equivalent.
• S3, OSS, EBS, ESSD, and self-hosted systems differ in durability, latency, topology, and operations.
• Alibaba’s exact long-run compute series starts in 2016 because earlier full SKU tables could not be reconstructed reliably.
• The endpoint may change after 2026-08-22; refresh before purchase.

Data and sources

• Full report
• Price anchors
• Normalized indexes
• Workload baskets
• Source ledger
• Checksums