Cloud Cost
Review Template
A practical template for reviewing cloud pricing, optimization tactics, and provider tradeoffs. Catalog snapshots come from Rateplane data; industry ranges are illustrative planning inputs, not audited benchmarks.
Published April 2026 · Use with your own billing data for production decisions
Public catalog first; connected spend requires account setup.
Your key findings — calculated from your own spend
Rateplane computes four findings from connected workspace data: top spending service with month-over-month trend, the biggest recent spend anomaly, your largest open rightsizing opportunity, and the total cost of detected waste awaiting remediation. These views require imported billing, utilization, or resource data before they become customer-specific.
Provider catalog overview
Stats from the Rateplane normalized catalog when provider data is available.
Illustrative price movement watchlist
Planning examples for the categories FinOps teams should review. These directional markers are not live provider-official YoY calculations; use the catalog and your imported billing data for production decisions.
| Service category | AWS | Azure | GCP | Overall trend |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| General-purpose compute (x86) | +1.2% | -0.8% | -2.1% | Falling |
| Memory-optimized instances | +0.4% | -1.2% | -0.9% | Falling |
| GPU / AI accelerator instances | +18.4% | +22.1% | +15.7% | Rising |
| Storage (block / object) | -4.2% | -5.6% | -6.1% | Falling |
| Managed databases (RDS/SQL/Cloud SQL) | +2.1% | +0.3% | -1.8% | Stable |
| Serverless / Function-as-a-Service | -8.3% | -7.1% | -9.4% | Falling |
| Managed Kubernetes (EKS/AKS/GKE) | +5.2% | +3.8% | 0% | Rising |
| Data egress / network transfer | -12.1% | -10.4% | -15.2% | Falling |
Illustrative direction markers only. Rateplane catalog rows are provider-sourced where available, but this table is not an audited price-history calculation.
Top 10 cost optimization tactics
Ranked by typical savings impact. Effort reflects operational complexity, not engineering skill required.
Lowest listed on-demand prices in the catalog
A current catalog snapshot of low-cost instance rows across the indexed providers. Search the full catalog →
| Instance | Provider | vCPU | RAM | On-demand /hr | Monthly est. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0028 | $2.04 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0028 | $2.04 |
| t3a.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0031 | $2.26 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0042 | $3.07 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0042 | $3.07 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0042 | $3.07 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0043 | $3.14 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0044 | $3.21 |
| t4g.nano | AWS | 2 | 0.5 GiB | $0.0046 | $3.36 |
Illustrative planning ranges by company size
Non-audited ranges to structure a workshop. Replace them with imported billing, allocation, and resource data for any customer-facing operating review.
| Company size | Monthly spend | Top cost category | Waste rate | Top savings lever |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Startup (1–50 employees) | $3K–$15K | Compute (EC2/VMs) | 72% | Right-size dev environments |
SMB (51–250 employees) | $15K–$80K | Compute + Storage | 65% | Implement auto-scaling |
Mid-market (251–1,000) | $80K–$400K | Databases + Data | 61% | Reserved Instance coverage |
Enterprise (1,001–5,000) | $400K–$2M | AI/ML + Data | 58% | EDP + commitment planning |
Large Enterprise (5,000+) | $2M+ | Multi-service portfolio | 54% | FinOps team + governance |
Planning ranges are illustrative and should be replaced with your imported billing and resource data during an operating review.
Download the full report
Create a workspace to export catalog views and build report packs from your own imported spend, allocation, and governance data.
- Full pricing trend data for 12 service categories
- Regional price variance heatmaps
- Commitment discount comparison tables
- FinOps maturity model scorecard
Get the next report first
The Q3 2026 report lands in July. Subscribe and we'll send it to your inbox the day it publishes — along with monthly cloud pricing digests between reports.
Quarterly notes and optional digests depend on configured notification preferences.
Stop guessing. Start comparing.
Search thousands of instance types across AWS, Azure, GCP, OCI, Linode, and Vultr. Compare options side by side, set price alerts, and turn cloud pricing research into a repeatable FinOps workflow.