AWS vs GCP vs Azure for indie developers: cheapest 2-server stack in 2026

Composite of vendor pricing pages for the three hyperscalers compared in this article. Sources: aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand, cloud.google.com/products/compute/pricing, azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/linux (used for editorial coverage of the products mentioned).

The bottom line

Three hyperscalers carry the indie-developer 2-server-stack conversation in 2026, and per their respective pricing pages, the cheapest landing changed materially in mid-2025. Per AWS’s Free Tier page, AWS replaced the old 12-month service-based free tier with a $200-credit Free Plan in July 2025 for newly-created accounts; the 750-hour t2.micro / t3.micro EC2 allowance now applies only to accounts created before that change. ^{1 2} Per Google Cloud’s free-tier page, GCP retained the Always Free e2-micro VM instance (1 vCPU shared core, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB standard disk) in select US regions for the entire lifetime of an account, plus a $300 / 90-day free-trial credit on top. ⁵ Per Azure’s free-account page, Azure offers 750 hours per month of B1s, B2pts v2 (Arm), and B2ats v2 (AMD) burstable VMs for 12 months, plus an Always Free set of 55+ services that continues after year one. ^{8 9}

For an indie developer running a 2-server stack (one web/app server + one database server, or two app servers behind a load balancer), the aggregated source consensus across LeanOps’s 2026 cost comparison and vendor pricing pages is that Google Cloud is the most durable cheapest option because the always-free e2-micro survives indefinitely. ¹² Azure wins year-one for a workload that needs the slightly larger B1s burstable footprint via the 12-month 750-hour allowance. AWS is the weakest of the three for an indie developer’s first server post-mid-2025 because the new $200-credit model expires in 6 months; AWS becomes competitive again at the committed-workload / Reserved Instance tier. Vendor pricing pages occasionally block automated verification; the price points cited here were confirmed via WebSearch summaries on 2026-05-19, so verify the live page before any purchase or subscription commit. USD is the primary currency; FX equivalents use $1 ≈ ₹85, £0.79, €0.92 reference rates on the same date.

What each hyperscaler’s free / cheap tier actually looks like

AWS: $200-credit Free Plan (since July 2025) + Always Free services

Per AWS’s Free Tier page and Free Tier FAQs, AWS changed the Free Tier structure in July 2025. Accounts created on or after that date land on a Free Plan with up to $200 in AWS credits ($100 upon sign-up, up to $100 more for exploring foundational services) usable across services for up to 6 months. Accounts created before the change retain the older 12-month service-based model (750 hours/month of t2.micro / t3.micro, 5 GB of S3, etc.). ^{1 2}

The Always Free Tier persists and carries genuine value: AWS Lambda’s 1 million invocations per month free, DynamoDB’s 25 GB storage and 200 million requests per month, CloudWatch basic monitoring, and Glacier long-term backup are usable indefinitely as long as workload stays within the limits. ¹

For paid EC2, per the AWS EC2 On-Demand pricing page and Vantage’s instance reference, the cheapest practical Linux server in us-east-1 is the t4g.micro at $0.0084/hour, or roughly $6.13 per month for 730 hours running continuously. ^{3 4 13} The t4g.small at $0.0168/hour comes to $12.26/month at 730 hours. ¹³ Both run on Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors with up to 40% better price-performance versus T3 per AWS marketing claims; the practical result is that t4g.micro is the indie-developer-friendly default for a Linux VM on AWS in 2026.

The honest weakness for a 2-server stack: per LeanOps’s 2026 cost comparison, AWS wins on committed workloads with predictable usage patterns (Reserved Instances or Savings Plans buy 30-60% discount), and on AWS-mature operational tooling (CloudWatch, IAM, the broad SDK ecosystem). It does not win on the indie-developer’s first-six-months economics post-July-2025. ¹²

Google Cloud: Always Free e2-micro + $300 / 90-day trial credit

Per Google Cloud’s free-tier page, GCP’s always-free quotas include one e2-micro VM instance per month (always free in select US regions: us-west1, us-central1, us-east1), 5 GB Cloud Storage, 1 GB Cloud Functions invocations per month, and 2 million Cloud Run requests per month. ⁵ The 90-day $300 credit on the free trial sits on top of the always-free quotas for new accounts.

The e2-micro specifications: 2 vCPU shared core, 1 GB memory, 30 GB standard persistent disk for the always-free configuration. ^{5 6} The single e2-micro VM running continuously is the durable always-free option for a small web service, a webhook handler, a personal blog, a low-traffic API endpoint, or a Discord/Slack bot.

The full-price e2-micro and e2-small for reference: per Vantage and economize.cloud pricing references, the e2-micro at sustained use in us-central1 is approximately $0.0084/hour ($6.11/month at 730 hours); e2-small is approximately $0.0168/hour ($12.23/month). ⁶ Sustained Use Discounts kick in automatically once a VM runs for more than 25% of a billing month, capping at 30% off for full-month usage with no commitment required. ⁷

The caveats per Google’s documentation: to stay within the free tier, the VM must be the e2-micro size, in a correct US region, with a 30 GB standard disk; data egress to the open internet costs money and is a routine source of unexpected charges. Starting 3 February 2026, projects must be on the Blaze (Pay-As-You-Go) plan to maintain access to default Cloud Storage buckets, though always-free quotas still apply. ⁵

Azure: 750-hour B1s burstable for 12 months + 55+ always-free services

Per Azure’s free-account page and free-services page, Azure offers a free account that includes 750 hours per month for 12 months of B1s, B2pts v2 (Arm-based), or B2ats v2 (AMD-based) burstable VMs, along with $200 in Azure credits for the first 30 days for paid services. ^{8 9}

Per Vantage’s B1s reference, the paid B1s on Pay-As-You-Go is approximately $0.0104/hour, or $7.59/month at 730 hours. ¹⁴ Web or API apps on App Service with 1 GB storage are available always (not just for 12 months), making the App Service free tier a useful complement to the B1s VM tier. ⁹

The 750-hours-per-month allowance during the 12-month period is per month, not 750 hours total. You can split the allowance across multiple instances: per Microsoft Learn, customers can run 5 B1s Windows VMs for 150 hours each, or 1 B1s for the entire month plus several others for shorter runs. ¹⁵

The Always Free Azure services that persist after year one include App Service (10 web/API/mobile apps with 1 GB storage), Azure Functions (1 million requests/month), Azure Cosmos DB (1,000 RU/s + 25 GB), Azure Blob Storage (5 GB), and Azure Container Apps (180,000 vCPU-seconds/month + 360,000 GB-seconds/month). ⁹

The honest caveat: the burstable VM credit is a 12-month window, not a permanent line. An indie developer who picks Azure for the B1s allowance must either migrate or commit to paid B1s after the year is up. At $7.59/month for one B1s, post-year-one Azure compute is in the same band as AWS t4g.micro and GCP e2-micro paid.

At a glance: the cheapest-2-server-stack decision matrix

Axis	AWS	Google Cloud	Azure
Cheapest indie-developer landing	$200 credit (6 months) for new accounts post-July-2025; 750-hour t2/t3.micro for pre-change accounts only	Always-free e2-micro (lifetime) in select US regions + $300 / 90-day trial	750 hr/month B1s for 12 months + $200 / 30-day credit; 55+ always-free services persist after year one
Free VM specifications	t2.micro / t3.micro: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, EBS-only (legacy free tier; new accounts get credit instead)	e2-micro: 2 vCPU shared core, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB standard disk (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1)	B1s: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM; B2pts v2 (Arm): 2 vCPU, 1 GB; B2ats v2 (AMD): 2 vCPU, 1 GB
Cheapest paid Linux VM (USD/month, on-demand)	t4g.micro ≈$6.13 (us-east-1, 2 vCPU Graviton2 Arm, 1 GB)	e2-micro ≈$6.11 (us-central1, 2 vCPU shared, 1 GB)	B1s ≈$7.59 (1 vCPU, 1 GB)
Cheapest 2-server stack (paid, USD/month)	≈$12.26 (2 × t4g.micro) + EBS storage	≈$12.22 (2 × e2-micro) + persistent disk; one free if in always-free region	≈$15.18 (2 × B1s) + managed disk; one free if within 750 hr allowance
Indicative ₹ / £ / € (2 paid VMs annual)	≈₹12,505 / £116 / €135	≈₹12,464 / £115 / €135	≈₹15,484 / £144 / €168
Egress to internet (first 100 GB)	First 100 GB free, then $0.09/GB up to 10 TB	First 100 GB free, then $0.12/GB at Premium Tier (less at Standard Tier)	First 100 GB free, then $0.087/GB up to 5 TB
Commitment discounts	Savings Plans + Reserved Instances: 30-60% off committed usage	Committed Use Discounts: ≈37% off 1-year / ≈55% off 3-year; Sustained Use auto-applied	Reserved VM Instances: 30-60% off committed usage
Indie-developer database options	RDS db.t4g.micro from ≈$12-15/mo; DynamoDB always-free tier covers small workloads	Cloud SQL db.f1-micro ≈$9/mo; db-g1-small ≈$13/mo (shared core for dev workloads)	Azure SQL Database Basic from ≈$5/mo; Cosmos DB always-free 1,000 RU/s + 25 GB
Region breadth (compute)	≈33 regions globally including N. Virginia (us-east-1), Frankfurt (eu-central-1), Mumbai (ap-south-1)	≈40 regions globally including us-central1, europe-west2 (London), asia-south1 (Mumbai), asia-south2 (Delhi)	60+ regions globally including East US, West Europe, Central India (Pune), South India (Chennai)
Best-fit indie-developer pick	Pick if you are committing to a multi-year workload and want Savings Plans / RIs, or you already use AWS-mature operational tools	Pick if you want a free server that survives indefinitely in a US region, or you value Sustained Use Discounts without commitment	Pick if you want year-one B1s plus the 55+ always-free services after, or you are inside the Microsoft / .NET / GitHub ecosystem

AWS

Cheapest indie-developer landing

$200 credit (6 months) for new accounts post-July-2025; 750-hour t2/t3.micro for pre-change accounts only

Free VM specifications

t2.micro / t3.micro: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM, EBS-only (legacy free tier; new accounts get credit instead)

Cheapest paid Linux VM (USD/month, on-demand)

t4g.micro ≈$6.13 (us-east-1, 2 vCPU Graviton2 Arm, 1 GB)

Cheapest 2-server stack (paid, USD/month)

≈$12.26 (2 × t4g.micro) + EBS storage

Indicative ₹ / £ / € (2 paid VMs annual)

≈₹12,505 / £116 / €135

Egress to internet (first 100 GB)

First 100 GB free, then $0.09/GB up to 10 TB

Commitment discounts

Savings Plans + Reserved Instances: 30-60% off committed usage

Indie-developer database options

RDS db.t4g.micro from ≈$12-15/mo; DynamoDB always-free tier covers small workloads

Region breadth (compute)

≈33 regions globally including N. Virginia (us-east-1), Frankfurt (eu-central-1), Mumbai (ap-south-1)

Best-fit indie-developer pick

Pick if you are committing to a multi-year workload and want Savings Plans / RIs, or you already use AWS-mature operational tools

Google Cloud

Cheapest indie-developer landing

Always-free e2-micro (lifetime) in select US regions + $300 / 90-day trial

Free VM specifications

e2-micro: 2 vCPU shared core, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB standard disk (us-west1, us-central1, us-east1)

Cheapest paid Linux VM (USD/month, on-demand)

e2-micro ≈$6.11 (us-central1, 2 vCPU shared, 1 GB)

Cheapest 2-server stack (paid, USD/month)

≈$12.22 (2 × e2-micro) + persistent disk; one free if in always-free region

Indicative ₹ / £ / € (2 paid VMs annual)

≈₹12,464 / £115 / €135

Egress to internet (first 100 GB)

First 100 GB free, then $0.12/GB at Premium Tier (less at Standard Tier)

Commitment discounts

Committed Use Discounts: ≈37% off 1-year / ≈55% off 3-year; Sustained Use auto-applied

Indie-developer database options

Cloud SQL db.f1-micro ≈$9/mo; db-g1-small ≈$13/mo (shared core for dev workloads)

Region breadth (compute)

≈40 regions globally including us-central1, europe-west2 (London), asia-south1 (Mumbai), asia-south2 (Delhi)

Best-fit indie-developer pick

Pick if you want a free server that survives indefinitely in a US region, or you value Sustained Use Discounts without commitment

Azure

Cheapest indie-developer landing

750 hr/month B1s for 12 months + $200 / 30-day credit; 55+ always-free services persist after year one

Free VM specifications

B1s: 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM; B2pts v2 (Arm): 2 vCPU, 1 GB; B2ats v2 (AMD): 2 vCPU, 1 GB

Cheapest paid Linux VM (USD/month, on-demand)

B1s ≈$7.59 (1 vCPU, 1 GB)

Cheapest 2-server stack (paid, USD/month)

≈$15.18 (2 × B1s) + managed disk; one free if within 750 hr allowance

Indicative ₹ / £ / € (2 paid VMs annual)

≈₹15,484 / £144 / €168

Egress to internet (first 100 GB)

First 100 GB free, then $0.087/GB up to 5 TB

Commitment discounts

Reserved VM Instances: 30-60% off committed usage

Indie-developer database options

Azure SQL Database Basic from ≈$5/mo; Cosmos DB always-free 1,000 RU/s + 25 GB

Region breadth (compute)

60+ regions globally including East US, West Europe, Central India (Pune), South India (Chennai)

Best-fit indie-developer pick

Pick if you want year-one B1s plus the 55+ always-free services after, or you are inside the Microsoft / .NET / GitHub ecosystem

When AWS is the right pick for an indie developer

AWS is the right pick when the workload trajectory points at multi-year commitment, the operational tooling (CloudWatch, IAM, the broad SDK and CLI ecosystem) is already part of how you think about cloud, or you have specific Always-Free services (Lambda, DynamoDB) that cover the workload shape. The signal is that you are building something you expect to run on EC2 in 2027 and 2028, and the Savings Plans / Reserved Instances at 30-60% discount are the structural saving the architecture earns over the next two years. ¹²

At $6.13/month for a t4g.micro and roughly $12.26/month for a 2-server Graviton2 stack in us-east-1, the on-demand pricing is in the same band as GCP and Azure for the same approximate footprint. ^{3 13} The Free Plan’s $200 credit covers approximately 6 months of a single t4g.micro plus modest auxiliary usage, which is enough for an MVP-stage workload to validate. ¹

The honest weakness for the indie-developer’s-first-server use case is the post-mid-2025 change. The old 12-month 750-hour t2.micro allowance was the workhorse for indie developers learning AWS; the new $200/6-month credit puts a hard ceiling on free usage and shifts the platform from “free landing for learning” to “credit-funded MVP”. GCP’s lifetime always-free e2-micro is the structurally more durable option for the same use case.

The Always-Free services compensate where the workload fits the shape. Lambda + DynamoDB + S3 + CloudFront can carry a real production application within free limits indefinitely, and the always-free Lambda allowance (1 million invocations/month) is the most generous of the three hyperscalers at the no-cost tier. ¹

When Google Cloud is the right pick for an indie developer

Google Cloud is the right pick when the goal is to keep one VM running indefinitely without paying for compute, and the workload fits inside the e2-micro footprint (2 vCPU shared core, 1 GB RAM, 30 GB standard disk). ⁵ Per the aggregated source consensus across LeanOps and vendor pricing pages, GCP’s always-free e2-micro is “genuinely the most durable free option for a developer running a personal project or prototype.” ¹²

The 90-day $300 trial credit on top of the always-free tier covers premium-tier compute experimentation in the trial window without burning into the always-free quota. The combination (90-day premium trial + lifetime e2-micro) is the structurally strongest indie-developer landing of the three hyperscalers.

Sustained Use Discounts are the GCP-specific structural advantage versus AWS and Azure for non-committed workloads. Per Google Cloud’s documentation, sustained-use discounts apply automatically once a VM runs for more than 25% of a billing month, capping at roughly 30% off for full-month usage without any commitment or upfront purchase. ⁷ For an indie developer running an always-on side project on a non-free tier, the automatic 30% discount on full-month VMs is meaningful and requires zero configuration.

For the 2-server stack specifically, the cheapest path is one always-free e2-micro for the web/app server in a US region, and one paid e2-micro at approximately $6.11/month for the database server (or a db-g1-small Cloud SQL instance at approximately $13/month for managed Postgres or MySQL). ^{6 12} The total runs $6-$19/month depending on whether the database is self-managed on a Compute Engine VM or on managed Cloud SQL.

The honest weakness is the regional restriction on the always-free e2-micro. The free VM must be in us-west1, us-central1, or us-east1; an indie developer routing to Mumbai (asia-south1), Delhi (asia-south2), London (europe-west2), or Singapore loses the always-free tier and pays full e2-micro pricing. For an India-targeting workload where latency to Indian users matters, the always-free advantage evaporates and the comparison flattens.

When Azure is the right pick for an indie developer

Azure is the right pick when you are inside the Microsoft / .NET / GitHub ecosystem, the 12-month B1s burstable window covers the validation phase of the workload, and the 55+ always-free services after year one cover the production shape. The signal is that you build on .NET or you ship from GitHub Actions and want tight integration with Azure Pipelines and Azure App Service, or you have a workload that fits Azure Functions, Azure Cosmos DB free tier, and App Service free tier without needing a persistent VM.

At $7.59/month for a paid B1s on-demand and roughly $15.18/month for a 2-server B1s stack, the post-year-one paid pricing is the highest of the three at the entry tier. ¹⁴ The 750-hours/month B1s allowance during year one materially offsets that: a 2-server B1s stack runs at zero compute cost for the entire first 12 months if both servers fit inside the per-month 750-hour allowance, or one server runs free indefinitely if you stay inside 750 hours. ^{8 9 15}

The Always Free services post-year-one are the structural value. App Service free tier (10 web/API/mobile apps with 1 GB storage), Azure Functions (1 million requests/month), Cosmos DB (1,000 RU/s + 25 GB), Blob Storage (5 GB), and Container Apps (180,000 vCPU-seconds + 360,000 GB-seconds) cover a serverless-leaning indie workload at zero ongoing cost. ⁹ For an indie developer comfortable building on App Service plus Functions plus Cosmos DB rather than a persistent VM plus database, Azure’s free-service breadth carries genuine multi-year value.

The honest weakness is the year-one cliff on the B1s allowance. After 12 months, the burstable VM credit ends, and the workload either migrates to App Service / Functions free tier (which requires re-architecting if you built on a B1s VM) or pays the full $7.59/month per B1s. The egress pricing ($0.087/GB after 100 GB free) is fractionally cheaper than AWS ($0.09/GB) but more expensive than GCP at Standard Tier. ¹¹

How to decide: a three-question framework

Three questions, in order, decide the right pick for most indie-developer 2-server stacks.

First, do you need a US-region VM that survives indefinitely at zero cost? If yes, Google Cloud’s always-free e2-micro is the only one of the three that delivers; AWS’s old t2.micro free tier no longer applies to accounts created after July 2025, and Azure’s B1s allowance ends at month 13. The lifetime always-free e2-micro is the structurally cheapest indie-developer landing of the three platforms. ^{5 12}

Second, does the workload trajectory point at a multi-year committed deployment? If yes, AWS’s Savings Plans and Reserved Instances at 30-60% discount are the strongest structural saving, and the AWS-mature operational tooling (CloudWatch, IAM, the broad SDK ecosystem) compounds over time. For a workload you expect to run on the same VM size for two-plus years, AWS earns the commitment discount more reliably than the alternatives at the indie scale. ^{1 12}

Third, do you build on .NET, ship from GitHub Actions, or want App Service plus Functions plus Cosmos DB as the deployment surface rather than a persistent VM? If yes, Azure’s 12-month B1s allowance covers year-one validation, and the post-year-one Always Free services (App Service, Functions, Cosmos DB, Blob, Container Apps) carry indefinite value for the serverless-leaning shape of an indie workload. ⁹

If the answer to all three is “I just want one Linux box to run a side project at the lowest possible cost”, GCP’s always-free e2-micro in a US region is the no-friction answer; deploy there, configure routing for non-US users via Cloudflare or another CDN if needed, and revisit the comparison when traffic grows beyond what the always-free tier supports.

What the third-party cost-comparison consensus says

Aggregating across LeanOps’s 2026 AWS vs Azure vs GCP cost comparison and the broader 2026 third-party cloud-pricing-comparison ecosystem, the source consensus is consistent on three points. ¹²

First, no hyperscaler is universally cheapest. AWS wins on committed multi-year workloads via Savings Plans and Reserved Instances; Azure wins for workloads already running .NET or Microsoft licenses; GCP wins on auto-discounted variable compute via Sustained Use Discounts and on data-heavy analytics workloads where BigQuery’s pricing model fits. ¹²

Second, for a small production stack (2 application servers, 1 managed relational database, object storage, moderate traffic), GCP comes in 6-10% cheaper than AWS and Azure for an equivalent footprint, driven by lower compute and database pricing. ¹²

Third, commitment discounts (Reserved Instances on AWS, Committed Use Discounts on GCP, Reserved VM Instances on Azure) reduce costs by 30 to 60% across the three hyperscalers. The reduction is comparable in shape across all three; the platform-specific difference is the discipline of how the commitment math works (AWS Savings Plans are flexible across instance families, GCP Committed Use Discounts are family-and-region-specific, Azure Reserved VM Instances are size-and-region-specific). ¹²

What to verify before you commit

Three things shift inside any 90-day window in this category, so verify on the live page before you commit:

First, the free-tier composition. AWS’s mid-2025 shift from service-based 12-month free tier to credit-based 6-month Free Plan was a structural change; Azure has adjusted the 750-hour-per-month allowance composition (the B2pts v2 Arm and B2ats v2 AMD additions are recent); GCP’s always-free e2-micro region restrictions (us-west1 / us-central1 / us-east1) have been stable but the 30 GB standard-disk cap has been the moving variable. Confirm the current always-free composition on each vendor’s free-tier page.

Second, on-demand instance pricing. Hyperscalers re-price routinely. The t4g.micro at $0.0084/hour, e2-micro at $0.0084/hour in us-central1, and B1s at $0.0104/hour are the 2026-05-19 reference numbers; confirm against the vendor pricing page for the region you plan to deploy to.

Third, the egress pricing. AWS at $0.09/GB after 100 GB free, Azure at $0.087/GB after 100 GB free, GCP at $0.12/GB at Premium Tier (less at Standard Tier) are the 2026-05-19 reference numbers per EgressCost.com and vendor documentation. ¹¹ Egress is the most-likely-to-surprise line item on an indie-developer cloud bill, especially if a side project goes briefly viral; budget conservatively or front the application with a CDN that handles cache egress separately.

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Editorial note: pricing for AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure was verified via WebSearch summary on 2026-05-19 because the vendors’ pricing pages returned WebFetch denials at publication runtime. Verify the live vendor pages before any commit. Pricing-page verification methodology follows the publication’s WebSearch-as-primary concession (ADR-0011, on file in docs/decisions/0011-websearch-as-primary-for-saas-pricing.md).