Cloud migration pricing is the most confidently quoted number in British IT and the least comparable. Ask three suppliers what it costs to move a mid-sized estate to Azure, AWS or a hybrid platform and you will get three figures that are not measuring the same thing: one is a project fee, one is a monthly run rate, one is a five-year total, and none of the three proposals will say which.
The gap between them is not rounding. On the estate modelled later in this guide the same technical outcome ranges from £87,375 to £171,500 for the project alone, and the three-year bill swings by £166,612 depending on a single staffing assumption nobody writes down.
This cloud migration pricing guide takes the arithmetic seriously. Every platform rate quoted below was pulled on 20 August 2026 from the vendors’ own live price feeds — Microsoft’s Azure Retail Prices API for the UK South region in pounds sterling, and Amazon’s published London on-demand and reserved rates for eu-west-2. Nothing here is a market estimate or a partner’s rule of thumb. Where a figure is an assumption in the worked model rather than a published rate, it is labelled as one.
We already have a general guide to what a cloud move costs and how long it takes, and a separate platform comparison for UK SMEs. This one does something narrower and more useful: it puts real 2026 British price-list numbers against each other, line by line, and then shows what those lines do to a real three-year budget. If you are about to sign something, read the worked example first and the vendor tables second.
Table of contents
- Why Cloud Migration Pricing Is Quoted Three Different Ways
- The Four Layers Inside Any Cloud Migration Pricing Model
- Azure Cloud Migration Pricing: What UK South Actually Costs
- AWS Cloud Migration Pricing: What the London Region Actually Costs
- Azure vs AWS Cloud Migration Pricing Compared Line by Line
- Commitment Discounts That Reshape Cloud Migration Pricing
- Licensing: The Biggest Single Lever on Cloud Migration Pricing
- Storage and Egress: The Cloud Migration Pricing Nobody Quotes
- Hybrid Cloud Pricing: When Keeping Metal Is Cheaper
- The People Bill Behind Every Cloud Migration Pricing Estimate
- Worked Example: Cloud Migration Pricing for a 140-Person UK Firm
- Three-Year Cloud Migration Pricing: Azure, AWS and Hybrid Side by Side
- What the CMA Ruling Changes About Cloud Migration Pricing in the UK
- Cloud Migration Pricing Risks That Break the Business Case
- How to Read a Supplier’s Cloud Migration Pricing Proposal
- Nine Levers That Genuinely Reduce Cloud Migration Pricing
- A 12-Month Plan to Bring Cloud Migration Pricing Under Control
- Cloud Migration Pricing Mistakes UK Businesses Keep Repeating
- Frequently Asked Questions About Cloud Migration Pricing
- References
Why Cloud Migration Pricing Is Quoted Three Different Ways
The project fee is not the price
The cloud migration pricing number on the front of a proposal is almost always the professional-services fee: the days it takes to design, build and move. It is the smallest of the three numbers in this guide and, in the model below, it accounts for 29.8% of what the organisation actually spends over three years. A supplier who competes only on that number is competing on 30p in the pound.
Reading cloud migration pricing as the project fee is the single most common budgeting error in British mid-market IT, and it is the reason so many boards approve a move and then discover the finance line has doubled by year two.
The run rate is not the price either
The second cloud migration pricing number is the monthly platform bill. This one is genuinely comparable between vendors — Azure and AWS both publish it — but it is only comparable if you compare the same shapes, the same commitment terms, the same operating system licensing position and the same storage tier. Change any one of those four and the comparison collapses. Most cloud migration pricing calculators default to on-demand Linux, which is the most expensive way to run a stable estate and the least like what you will actually buy.
The total is the price
The third number is the only one that matters: the fully loaded cost of owning the platform for as long as you intend to keep it. That means project fees, run rate, dual running while waves land, internal staff time, disaster recovery, monitoring, tooling and the licensing you carry across. Honest cloud migration pricing states all seven. The table below separates the three questions so you can at least establish which one a supplier has answered.
| Question | What it measures | Typical shape | Share of the three-year bill |
|---|---|---|---|
| What will the migration cost? | Professional-services days to design, build and cut over | One-off, front-loaded | 29.8% |
| What will it cost to run? | Compute, storage, egress, DR and platform tooling | Recurring, grows with data | 55.3% |
| What will it cost to own? | Both of the above plus internal time, dual running and governance | Recurring plus a year-one spike | 100% |
The Four Layers Inside Any Cloud Migration Pricing Model
Layer one: compute
Compute is the layer everybody looks at and the one that behaves best. Almost every cloud infrastructure estimate starts here, because it is the easiest layer to model and the easiest to get wrong by 40%. Both hyperscalers publish per-hour rates for every virtual machine size in every region, and both discount those rates heavily for a commitment. Compute is also the layer where good engineering produces the biggest percentage saving, because the difference between a right-sized reserved instance and an oversized on-demand one is routinely 70% or more. Any cloud migration pricing model that does not state its commitment assumption is not a model.
Layer two: storage
Storage is the cloud migration pricing layer that quietly wins. In the worked example below it costs £37,704 a year against £22,928 for compute — 64% more — and unlike compute it grows every month whether or not anyone does anything. Storage is also the layer where tier choice is worth the most: moving 32 TB of a 41 TB estate from premium to standard managed disks saves £22,849 a year without touching a single application.
Layer three: data movement
Egress is the cloud migration pricing layer with the worst reputation and, for a mid-sized British business, the smallest bill. It deserves the scrutiny it gets at hyperscale and almost none of it below 20 TB a month. We will price it exactly rather than repeating the folklore.
Layer four: people
The people layer never appears on a vendor calculator and is the second-largest line in the model below. It is also the line on which the hybrid-versus-cloud argument entirely turns. A serious cloud migration pricing exercise assigns a named fraction of a named person to running the platform, prices that fraction at a fully loaded rate, and defends it. Anything less is not a budget, it is a hope.
Azure Cloud Migration Pricing: What UK South Actually Costs
The published rates, in pounds, for UK South
Microsoft publishes every UK South rate in sterling through a public price feed, which makes Azure cloud migration pricing unusually easy to verify. The table below is a direct read of that feed on 20 August 2026. Reservation figures are the total charge for the whole term, not per hour, which is a distinction that trips up a surprising number of business cases.
| Azure VM size | vCPU / RAM | Linux pay-as-you-go | Windows pay-as-you-go | 1-year reservation | 3-year reservation |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| D2s v5 | 2 / 8 GiB | £0.0835 per hour | £0.1528 per hour | £451.52 | £866.92 |
| D4s v5 | 4 / 16 GiB | £0.1671 per hour | £0.3055 per hour | £903.04 | £1,733.83 |
| D8s v5 | 8 / 32 GiB | £0.3341 per hour | £0.6111 per hour | £1,806.07 | £3,468.41 |
| E4s v5 (memory) | 4 / 32 GiB | £0.2227 per hour | £0.3612 per hour | £1,204.05 | £2,312.53 |
| B2ms (burstable) | 2 / 8 GiB | £0.0710 per hour | £0.0768 per hour | Not offered | Not offered |
What those numbers mean in a year
A D4s v5 on pay-as-you-go costs £0.1671 × 8,760 hours = £1,463.80 a year. The same machine on a one-year reservation costs £903.04, which is 38.3% less. On a three-year reservation it costs £1,733.83 for the whole term, or £577.94 a year — 60.5% less than pay-as-you-go. That single decision moves more money in a cloud migration pricing model than most architecture choices, and it is available on day one of any migration.
The burstable trap
Note the B2ms line. It looks cheaper than the D2s v5 at £0.0710 an hour and it is, until the workload exhausts its CPU credits and either throttles or bills for burst. Burstable sizes are excellent for genuinely idle machines and a false economy for anything with a steady baseline. They also carry no reservation option, so a burstable-heavy design forfeits the 60.5% lever above. Several of the worst cloud migration pricing surprises we see start with a vendor sizing tool that defaulted a whole estate to burstable machines.
AWS Cloud Migration Pricing: What the London Region Actually Costs
The published rates, in dollars, for eu-west-2
AWS cloud migration pricing begins in US dollars, which introduces a currency question before you have compared a single specification. The rates below are Amazon’s published Linux on-demand, standard reserved and spot prices for eu-west-2, read on 20 August 2026.
| EC2 instance | vCPU / RAM | On-demand | 1-year reserved | 3-year reserved | Spot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| t3.medium | 2 / 4 GiB | $0.0472 | $0.0297 | $0.0204 | $0.0173 |
| m7i.large | 2 / 8 GiB | $0.11655 | $0.0770 | $0.0530 | $0.0405 |
| m7i.xlarge | 4 / 16 GiB | $0.2331 | $0.1540 | $0.1060 | $0.0813 |
| m7i.2xlarge | 8 / 32 GiB | $0.4662 | $0.3079 | $0.2120 | $0.2124 |
| m7i.4xlarge | 16 / 64 GiB | $0.9324 | $0.6159 | $0.4239 | $0.4710 |
| r7i.xlarge (memory) | 4 / 32 GiB | $0.3108 | $0.2061 | $0.1405 | $0.1168 |
| c7i.xlarge (compute) | 4 / 8 GiB | $0.2121 | $0.1400 | $0.0964 | $0.0875 |
The currency problem nobody prices
A dollar-denominated bill is a forecasting problem, not just a conversion problem. To compare fairly we need a rate, and rather than pick one off a market feed we can derive Microsoft’s own: the identical D4s v5 Linux SKU lists at $0.222 and £0.1671 in the same price feed, which implies £0.7527 per US dollar. Every conversion in this guide uses that figure, so the comparison is internally consistent even if sterling moves next week. Any cloud migration pricing model that puts an AWS estate into a sterling budget without stating its rate and its sensitivity is understating its own risk.
Spot is not a saving, it is a different product
The m7i.2xlarge spot price of $0.2124 is 54% below on-demand and almost identical to the one-year reserved rate — but spot capacity can be reclaimed with two minutes’ notice. It belongs in batch processing and continuous-integration fleets, not in a line-of-business estate. Treat it as a workload strategy, never as a cloud migration pricing discount to put in a business case.
Azure vs AWS Cloud Migration Pricing Compared Line by Line
Like for like, in sterling
Converting the AWS London rates at £0.7527 gives the first genuinely like-for-like cloud migration pricing comparison in this guide. The four pairings below match on vCPU count and memory exactly.
| Shape | Azure UK South | Azure £ per hour | AWS London | AWS £ per hour | Azure advantage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 vCPU / 8 GiB | D2s v5 | £0.0835 | m7i.large | £0.0877 | 4.8% cheaper |
| 4 vCPU / 16 GiB | D4s v5 | £0.1671 | m7i.xlarge | £0.1754 | 4.8% cheaper |
| 8 vCPU / 32 GiB | D8s v5 | £0.3341 | m7i.2xlarge | £0.3509 | 4.8% cheaper |
| 4 vCPU / 32 GiB | E4s v5 | £0.2227 | r7i.xlarge | £0.2339 | 4.8% cheaper |
The consistency is the finding. Azure UK South list prices sit 4.8% below AWS London list prices across every general-purpose and memory-optimised pairing tested — not a rounding artefact but a deliberate, uniform positioning. On its own it is far too small a margin to decide a platform. It is, however, large enough to matter once compounded across a three-year commitment and an estate of any size.
Here is the same comparison drawn out. Bars are scaled against £0.36 an hour.
Where the gap widens
The list-price gap is 4.8%. The committed-price gap is not. On a one-year term the Azure machine costs £0.1031 an hour against £0.1159 for the AWS equivalent — 11.1% cheaper. On a three-year term it is £0.0660 against £0.0798, or 17.3% cheaper, because Azure discounts a three-year commitment by 60.5% while AWS discounts a standard three-year reserved instance by 54.5%. The deeper you commit, the wider the gap. That is the opposite of what most people assume, and it is why any cloud migration pricing comparison run at on-demand rates flatters AWS.
Commitment Discounts That Reshape Cloud Migration Pricing
What a term actually buys
The chart below shows what is left of the on-demand bill after each commitment option, using the 4 vCPU / 16 GiB pairing throughout. Lower is cheaper.
The commitment you should not make on day one
None of this argues for signing a three-year term during a migration. Reservations are bought against a shape and a region, and the shape you migrate is very rarely the shape you settle on: right-sizing after three months of real telemetry routinely takes 20% to 30% off a lifted-and-shifted estate. The disciplined sequence is to migrate on demand, run for a quarter, right-size, and only then commit. Building cloud migration pricing around commitments you buy on day one locks in the oversizing you brought with you.
Convertible and savings-plan options
Both vendors sell a more flexible, slightly more expensive version of the same idea. The AWS convertible reserved instance for the 4 vCPU shape costs $0.1213 an hour over three years against $0.1060 for the standard one — a 14.4% premium for the right to change instance family. Azure’s savings plan works on committed spend per hour rather than a specific SKU. For a first migration the flexibility is usually worth the premium, and the cloud migration pricing difference between the two is small enough that it should never decide a platform.
Licensing: The Biggest Single Lever on Cloud Migration Pricing
The Windows tax, priced
Look again at the Azure table and subtract the Linux column from the Windows column. That difference is the operating system licence, and it is enormous.
| Azure size | Linux | Windows | Licence uplift per hour | Licence uplift per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D2s v5 | £0.0835 | £0.1528 | £0.0693 | £607 |
| D4s v5 | £0.1671 | £0.3055 | £0.1384 | £1,212 |
| D8s v5 | £0.3341 | £0.6111 | £0.2770 | £2,427 |
| E4s v5 | £0.2227 | £0.3612 | £0.1385 | £1,213 |
On a D4s v5 the licence costs 83% of the machine underneath it. Across the 22 Windows machines in the worked example it comes to £25,471 a year, which is 30.5% of that estate’s entire compute bill. No amount of instance right-sizing recovers a number that size. This is why licensing, not architecture, is where serious cloud migration pricing work starts.
Azure Hybrid Benefit
If you hold Windows Server core licences with active Software Assurance, or qualifying subscription licences, Azure Hybrid Benefit lets you apply them to Azure virtual machines and pay the Linux rate instead. Microsoft states savings of up to 80% on Windows Server when combined with a reserved instance, and up to 85% on SQL Server, with a 180-day window in which the licence may run on-premises and in Azure at once. In the worked cloud migration pricing example it removes the entire £25,471.
Why the same lever does not exist on AWS
This is the asymmetry the UK competition regulator spent three years examining. Bringing your own Windows Server licence to AWS generally means dedicated hosts rather than shared tenancy, which changes the economics of the whole design; the alternative is the licence-included rate. We have deliberately not priced Windows on AWS in this guide, because the two routes produce two incomparable bills and quoting either as “the AWS number” would be misleading. What we can say is that for a Microsoft-heavy estate with Software Assurance already in place, licensing dominates cloud migration pricing far more than the 4.8% list-price gap ever will.
The other licences in the room
Windows is not the only one. SQL Server, Oracle, SAP and Red Hat all price differently in each cloud, and vendors’ virtualisation rules can make a nominally cheaper platform more expensive once core factors are applied. Build the licence position into the cloud migration pricing model before you build the architecture, and get it in writing from the publisher rather than the reseller. Good IT asset management records make this exercise a week’s work; poor ones make it a quarter’s.
Storage and Egress: The Cloud Migration Pricing Nobody Quotes
Managed disk rates for UK South
| Azure disk tier | Capacity | Price per month | Effective per GiB | Cost of 41 TB per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premium SSD P30 | 1,024 GiB | £123.0748 | £0.1202 | £60,553 |
| Standard SSD E30 | 1,024 GiB | £63.5738 | £0.0621 | £31,278 |
| Premium SSD P10 | 128 GiB | £17.9463 | £0.1402 | n/a |
| Standard SSD E10 | 128 GiB | £7.9467 | £0.0621 | n/a |
The premium tier costs 93.6% more per gibibyte than standard SSD. Very few line-of-business file shares, archive volumes or reporting databases need premium performance, and yet the default in almost every lift-and-shift design is premium everywhere. Getting this one decision right is worth more than most of the compute optimisation in this guide, and storage tiering remains the least glamorous cloud migration pricing decision on the page.
Egress, priced honestly
| Monthly outbound volume | Azure UK South | AWS London (converted) | Azure advantage |
|---|---|---|---|
| First 100 GB | Free | Free | Level |
| 100 GB to 10 TB | £0.0602 per GB | £0.0677 per GB | 11.1% cheaper |
| 10 TB to 50 TB | £0.0489 per GB | £0.0640 per GB | 23.6% cheaper |
| 50 TB to 150 TB | £0.0452 per GB | £0.0527 per GB | 14.2% cheaper |
| Above 150 TB | £0.0301 per GB | £0.0376 per GB | 20.0% cheaper |
| Inbound | Free | Free | Level |
The egress bill you will actually get
Now the useful part. Our worked estate pushes 6 TB a month to the internet — a heavy figure for 140 people. That is 6,144 GB, less the 100 GB allowance, at £0.0602: £363.85 a month, or £4,366 a year. On AWS the same traffic costs £4,913. The difference between the two hyperscalers on egress, for a real British mid-market business, is £547 a year. Egress deserves careful design at hyperscale and almost none of the anxiety it generates below it. Anyone using egress fear to steer your cloud migration pricing decision is either selling something or has not done the sum.
Inter-zone traffic is the one to watch
The charge that does creep up is inter-availability-zone transfer at £0.0075 per GB in each direction on Azure. A chatty application spread across zones for resilience can move far more data internally than it ever sends to the internet. Design zone placement deliberately, put it in the cloud migration pricing model, and measure it in the first month rather than the first invoice.
Hybrid Cloud Pricing: When Keeping Metal Is Cheaper
What changed on the on-premises side
Hybrid is no longer the lazy answer in a cloud migration pricing debate, and the reason is Broadcom. Since acquiring VMware, perpetual licences have gone, everything is a per-core subscription, and from 10 April 2025 the minimum order line rose from 16 cores to 72 cores per product. Customers have reported net increases from 150% to over 1,000%, and European cloud trade bodies have cited cases at 800% to 1,500%. A great many British hybrid estates are now being repriced by that change rather than by any cloud decision. Our own cloud exit strategy guide covers the reverse direction, and the arithmetic is symmetrical.
The Azure Local alternative
Microsoft’s on-premises platform, Azure Local, is billed through the same feed as everything else: £0.2483 per physical core per day, or roughly £7.55 per core per month, waivable in whole or part with Azure Hybrid Benefit. For the 96-core estate in our example that is £8,699 a year at full price — a fraction of a repriced VMware renewal, which is why it is now the default hybrid conversation in UK mid-market IT infrastructure rather than a curiosity.
The costs a hybrid model must include
A hybrid cloud migration pricing comparison is only honest if the on-premises column carries everything the cloud column carries. That means hardware amortisation, power, cooling, floor space, UPS maintenance, insurance, replacement parts, out-of-hours cover and the staff time that keeps it alive. Using the UK medium-industrial electricity price of 24p per kWh, a 3.4 kW IT load at a power usage effectiveness of 1.6 draws 47,654 kWh a year and costs £11,437 in electricity alone. Most hybrid business cases we review omit that line entirely.
The rate that decides it
Here is the hybrid cloud migration pricing line-up for our example, priced properly. Three hosts at £58,000 amortised over five years, the Azure Local host fee, power, facilities and a stated fraction of one person.
| Hybrid line item | Basis | Annual cost |
|---|---|---|
| Azure Local host fee | 96 cores at £0.2483 per day | £8,699 |
| Hardware amortisation | £58,000 over five years (assumption) | £11,600 |
| Power and cooling | 47,654 kWh at £0.24 | £11,437 |
| Facilities, UPS, insurance | Assumption | £4,200 |
| On-premises administration | 0.35 FTE at £77,250 loaded | £27,038 |
| Replication to Azure | 12 VMs at £18.8133 per month | £2,709 |
| Public tier kept in Azure | 8 × D4s v5 on 3-year reservation | £4,624 |
| Cloud storage retained | 12 TB Standard SSD | £9,155 |
| Total | £79,462 |
The People Bill Behind Every Cloud Migration Pricing Estimate
What the UK market actually charges
Day rates decide the project fee, and salaries decide the run cost, so both halves of cloud migration pricing move with the UK labour market. Both are measurable. The figures below are the UK medians for the six months to 20 August 2026.
| Role or skill | Median | 25th | 75th | Sample | Year on year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Azure contract, per day | £525 | £438 | £625 | 5,843 rates | +1.94% |
| AWS contract, per day | £550 | £456 | £650 | 4,428 rates | +4.76% |
| Cloud architect contract, per day | £600 | £550 | £703 | 227 rates | −4.00% |
| Azure permanent, per year | £65,000 | £46,250 | £83,750 | 7,840 salaries | +8.33% |
| AWS permanent, per year | £72,500 | £55,000 | £90,000 | 4,562 salaries | Flat |
Read the sample sizes, not just the medians
The cloud architect median of £600 rests on 227 quoted rates. The Azure contract median of £525 rests on 5,843. Those are not equally reliable numbers, and the architect figure has fallen 4% year on year while Azure and AWS rates rose — a thin sample moving against the trend is a sampling artefact more often than a market signal. Any cloud migration pricing benchmark built on a small sample should be quoted with its sample attached.
What an internal engineer really costs
Employer National Insurance has been 15% since 6 April 2025 with a secondary threshold of £5,000, frozen to April 2031. So an Azure engineer on the £65,000 median costs £65,000 + (0.15 × £60,000) = £9,000 in employer NI + £3,250 pension = £77,250 fully loaded. Across 227 available days after leave and bank holidays that is £340.31 a day, or £45.37 an hour. Every internal hour in the model below is priced at that rate, because internal time is not free and pretending otherwise is how cloud migration pricing models come in 20% light.
The off-payroll change nobody has budgeted for
Two 2026 changes matter if you are hiring contractors. From 6 April 2026 the small-company thresholds for off-payroll working rose — turnover from £10.2m to £15m and balance sheet from £5.1m to £7.5m — pulling more organisations out of the determination duty. And from the same date the agency, or the end client where there is none, is jointly and severally liable for PAYE and NIC on umbrella-supplied workers. Both change the risk profile of the contractor route in the cloud migration pricing routes table below.
Worked Example: Cloud Migration Pricing for a 140-Person UK Firm
The estate
A 140-person wholesale distribution business in Manchester. One comms room, three VMware hosts of two sockets and sixteen cores each — 96 physical cores — carrying 34 virtual machines, of which 22 run Windows and 12 run Linux. Storage is 41 TB. Outbound traffic runs at 6 TB a month. The finance system, the warehouse management system and a reporting database are the three that cannot be down for a working day. This is an ordinary British estate, and the same shape drives most of the cloud migration pricing enquiries we receive.
Mapping it to Azure
Six machines map to D2s v5, eighteen to D4s v5, eight to D8s v5, and two memory-heavy database servers to E4s v5. This is where cloud migration pricing stops being theoretical. At Linux pay-as-you-go rates the hourly total is (6 × £0.0835) + (18 × £0.1671) + (8 × £0.3341) + (2 × £0.2227) = £6.6270 an hour, which is £58,053 a year.
Adding the Windows machines
Twenty-two of those machines run Windows: six D2s, twelve D4s, two D8s and both E4s. The licence uplift is (6 × £0.0693) + (12 × £0.1384) + (2 × £0.2770) + (2 × £0.1385) = £2.9076 an hour, or £25,471 a year. Naive lift-and-shift compute on pay-as-you-go therefore costs £83,524 a year, and that is the cloud migration pricing figure most first drafts stop at.
Now optimise it
Apply Azure Hybrid Benefit and the £25,471 disappears. Apply three-year reservations at £288.97, £577.94, £1,156.14 and £770.84 per machine per year respectively and the remaining Linux-rate bill falls to (6 × £288.97) + (18 × £577.94) + (8 × £1,156.14) + (2 × £770.84) = £22,928 a year. That is a 72.6% reduction on the naive figure, achieved entirely through licensing and commitment, with no change to a single application. Two cloud migration pricing decisions, no engineering.
Storage, egress and DR
Forty-one terabytes on premium disks would cost £60,553 a year. Tiering nine terabytes to premium and thirty-two to standard costs (9 × £123.0748) + (32 × £63.5738) = £3,142.03 a month, or £37,704 — saving £22,849. Egress adds £4,366. Azure Site Recovery for all 34 machines at £18.8133 each adds £7,676. Every one of those lines belongs in cloud migration pricing from the first draft. Backup, monitoring and log ingestion are budgeted at £6,400, and a quarter of an engineer at £77,250 loaded adds £19,313.
The optimised Azure year
Compute is not the biggest line. Storage is, at 38.3%, and people are third at 19.6%. Egress — the item that dominates most conversations about cloud migration pricing — is 4.4%. If your business case spends more paragraphs on egress than on storage tiering, it is optimising the wrong end of the bill.
The same estate on AWS
At London on-demand rates the identical mapping costs (6 × $0.11655) + (18 × $0.2331) + (8 × $0.4662) + (2 × $0.3108) = $9.2463 an hour, or £60,967 a year at £0.7527 — 5.0% above Azure’s £58,053. On three-year standard reserved instances it costs $4.2030 an hour, or £27,713 a year, which is 20.9% above Azure’s £22,928. Add the Windows licensing position from the previous section and the cloud migration pricing gap widens further for a Microsoft-heavy estate.
Three-Year Cloud Migration Pricing: Azure, AWS and Hybrid Side by Side
The project itself
Before the run rate there is the build, and it is the half of cloud migration pricing that suppliers actually compete on. A realistic plan for 34 machines and 41 TB comes to 140 professional-services days.
| Phase | Days | Share | What it delivers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery and dependency mapping | 14 | 10.0% | Inventory, dependencies, migration waves |
| Landing zone, network, identity | 20 | 14.3% | Subscriptions, policy, connectivity, directory |
| Data and storage design | 12 | 8.6% | Tiering, seeding, replication plan |
| Migration waves (four) | 38 | 27.1% | The machines actually move |
| Application remediation | 22 | 15.7% | What breaks when the IP address changes |
| Security and compliance | 10 | 7.1% | Baselines, logging, access review |
| Cutover and hypercare | 16 | 11.4% | Go-live weekends and the fortnight after |
| Training and handover | 8 | 5.7% | The team can run it without the supplier |
| Total | 140 | 100% |
Four ways to buy the same 140 days
| Route | Arithmetic | Cost | Index | Who carries the risk |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A — Contractors direct | 45 × £600 + 115 × £525 | £87,375 | 59 | You, entirely |
| B — Partner, time and materials | 140 × £1,050 | £147,000 | 100 | Shared |
| C — Partner, fixed price | B plus a 16.7% risk premium | £171,500 | 117 | The supplier |
| D — Blended squad | 70 × £1,150 + 180 × £340.31 | £141,756 | 96 | Shared, slower |
Year one is not a typical year
The cloud migration pricing spread across those four routes is £84,125. Taking route B, year one carries the fee, the internal time, seven months of the new platform as waves land, seven months of dual running on the old one, training and assessment tooling: £147,000 + £21,099 + £57,392 + £39,667 + £9,400 + £6,800 = £281,358. Years two and three settle at £104,387 and £106,900. The three-year Azure total is £492,645, of which the migration fee is 29.8%. If you take one number from this guide about cloud migration pricing, take that one: the invoice everyone negotiates over is under a third of the money.
Azure against hybrid over three and five years
Both columns below rest on the same cloud migration pricing assumptions. The hybrid route runs a smaller project — 60 days at £1,050 plus 30 internal days — and keeps the £79,462 annual run cost from earlier. Three-year hybrid comes to £152,671 + £85,462 + £87,900 = £326,033, which is £166,612 less than the Azure path, or 33.8%. Extend to five years, add a £58,000 hardware refresh in year five, and hybrid still lands at £567,333 against £714,045 — £146,712 or 20.5% less.
The assumption that flips the answer
That hybrid advantage rests on one number: 0.35 of a person to run the on-premises platform. Strip the £27,038 administration line out and hybrid costs £52,424 a year against Azure’s £98,387 — a gap of £45,963. Divide that gap by the £77,250 loaded cost of an engineer and you get 0.595. In other words, hybrid wins only if the estate genuinely runs on less than six-tenths of one person.
If patching, firmware, backup verification, capacity planning, out-of-hours callouts and hardware failures actually consume 0.8 of an engineer, hybrid becomes £114,225 a year and Azure is the cheaper platform. Nothing else in this cloud migration pricing model is anywhere near as sensitive, and nothing else is as routinely guessed.
What the CMA Ruling Changes About Cloud Migration Pricing in the UK
Where the UK investigation landed
The outcome here matters because it decides whether exit costs sit inside regulated cloud migration pricing or purely inside a negotiation. The Competition and Markets Authority closed its cloud services market investigation on 31 July 2025, having provisionally found competition concerns in January that year, and put the question of Strategic Market Status designations to its board for a first-quarter 2026 decision.
Reporting in late March 2026 indicated the CMA accepted voluntary commitments from Amazon and Microsoft on egress fees and interoperability rather than designating AWS, and instead opened a Strategic Market Status investigation into Microsoft’s business software ecosystem — precisely the licensing asymmetry priced earlier in this guide. Check the CMA case page for the current position before relying on it in a contract.
Why UK buyers do not get the EU’s egress protection
This matters more than most British buyers realise. Under the EU Data Act, from 12 January 2027 cloud providers may no longer charge switching fees — expressly including egress — to customers moving to another provider or back on-premises. Between January 2024 and that date, such charges must be capped at the provider’s direct costs. The United Kingdom is not covered. A British-only buyer has no statutory equivalent, which means exit terms have to be negotiated rather than assumed, and that belongs in your cloud migration pricing model as a contractual line rather than a legal right.
What the vendors offer voluntarily
Both hyperscalers do waive exit egress in practice. Amazon has waived data transfer out charges for customers leaving AWS entirely since 5 March 2024, subject to support approval at account level and a 90-day completion window; Microsoft operates an equivalent. These are commercial policies, not entitlements, so treat them in cloud migration pricing as a policy rather than a right; they cover a full departure rather than a partial one. Moving half an estate elsewhere is exactly the scenario neither policy covers and the one most organisations eventually face.
Get exit into the contract
The practical answer is unglamorous: negotiate the exit terms at signature, when you have leverage, not at renewal when you have none. Ask for written confirmation of egress waiver conditions, data export formats, the notice period, and what assistance is included. Exit is the last cloud migration pricing line anyone negotiates and the first one that hurts. Good vendor management practice treats this as a standard clause rather than an awkward question, and any supplier who bristles at it is telling you something useful.
Cloud Migration Pricing Risks That Break the Business Case
Estimating from a spreadsheet instead of telemetry
The most common failure is sizing from the on-premises specification rather than from measured utilisation. A physical server bought for peak load five years ago is not a specification, it is an artefact. Collect at least four weeks of CPU, memory, disk and network telemetry before mapping anything, and expect the measured requirement to be 30% to 50% below the nameplate. Every hour spent on this pays back several times over in avoided cloud migration pricing overrun.
Forgetting the dual-running period
For the seven months our example spends migrating in waves, it pays for both platforms. That is £39,667 of dual running in year one — 14.1% of the year-one total — and it appears in almost no supplier proposal because it is not the supplier’s cost. Model it explicitly in the cloud migration pricing forecast, and shorten it by sequencing waves tightly rather than by rushing individual cutovers.
Treating the reservation as free money
A three-year reservation is a three-year liability. If the business restructures, divests a division or replaces the application, the reservation continues. A liability that outlives the design is a cloud migration pricing risk, not a saving. Buy reservations against your stable baseline only, cover the variable layer with on-demand capacity, and revisit the split every quarter. The cloud cost allocation and chargeback discipline exists precisely so someone owns that review.
Assuming waste will not happen to you
Flexera’s 2026 State of the Cloud survey put self-reported wasted spend at 29% — up for the first time in five years — with 85% of respondents naming cost management as their top cloud challenge, 63% now running FinOps teams and 71% a cloud centre of excellence. Apply that 29% to our example’s £98,387 and it is £28,532 a year of nothing. Waste is not an exotic failure; it is the default state of an unmanaged estate, and pricing a migration without pricing the discipline that prevents it is wishful.
How to Read a Supplier's Cloud Migration Pricing Proposal
Ten questions that expose a weak quote
| Ask this | A good answer sounds like | A red flag sounds like |
|---|---|---|
| Is this the project fee, the run rate or the total? | All three, separately stated | “It’s the migration cost” |
| What commitment term is the run rate priced at? | On-demand for six months, then reserved | Three-year reserved from day one |
| What exchange rate did you use? | A stated rate plus a sensitivity band | No answer, or “we price in dollars” |
| Which storage tier is every volume on? | A per-volume tiering table | Premium everywhere |
| Have you applied Azure Hybrid Benefit? | Yes, with the licence position evidenced | “We can look at that later” |
| How many of our days are in the plan? | A named internal day count | Zero client effort assumed |
| How long do we run both platforms? | A dated wave plan with a cost attached | Dual running not mentioned |
| What is measured egress today? | A figure from your own firewall logs | An industry average |
| Who runs it on day 91? | A named FTE fraction and a rate | “Your existing team” |
| What does leaving cost? | Written exit terms and export formats | “Nobody ever leaves” |
Compare on assumptions, not on totals
When three cloud migration pricing proposals differ by £80,000, the totals tell you nothing and the assumptions tell you everything. Normalise every quote to the same commitment term, the same storage tiering, the same licence position, the same internal day count and the same dual-running window, and the spread usually collapses to under 15%. What remains is a genuine difference in scope or capability, which is the only thing worth negotiating. A structured migration request for proposal forces that normalisation up front.
The tell of a serious supplier
A firm-sounding total produced before discovery is a sales artefact, not cloud migration pricing. A serious supplier will decline to give you a firm total before discovery, and will offer a paid, fixed-price discovery instead. That is not evasion. It is the only honest position for a firm that has not yet seen your dependency map, and it is a far better predictor of a project that lands on budget than a confident number produced in a sales meeting. Firms that lead with digital transformation language and finish with a number they cannot source should be treated with the same suspicion.
Nine Levers That Genuinely Reduce Cloud Migration Pricing
Levers one to three: the licence, the tier and the term
Apply Azure Hybrid Benefit if you hold the licences — worth £25,471 a year in our example. Tier storage properly rather than defaulting to premium — worth £22,849. Commit for three years against your stable baseline once you have telemetry — worth £35,125 on the Linux-rate compute alone. Those three cloud migration pricing levers together are worth £83,445 a year on a £98,387 platform, which is why they come first.
Levers four to six: shape, schedule and shutdown
Shape, schedule and shutdown are the operational half of cloud migration pricing. Right-size from measured utilisation, not from nameplate. Schedule development and test machines to stop outside working hours, which removes roughly 65% of their hours from the bill for a change that takes an afternoon. And decommission properly: orphaned disks, unattached public IP addresses and forgotten snapshots survive migrations remarkably well, and they bill exactly the same as useful ones.
Levers seven to nine: data, discipline and ownership
Archive cold data before you move it rather than after — every terabyte you migrate is a terabyte you pay to store forever. Put a named owner on the monthly bill with authority to act, not just to report. And run a formal review each quarter against forecast; both hyperscalers expose the data, and cloud migration pricing that is reviewed quarterly behaves very differently from cloud migration pricing that is reviewed annually. Our Azure cost optimisation checklist works through the mechanics.
A 12-Month Plan to Bring Cloud Migration Pricing Under Control
Months one to three: measure
Without a measured baseline, cloud migration pricing is guesswork with a decimal point. Collect four weeks of telemetry across compute, memory, storage and network. Build the dependency map. Establish the current cost of the incumbent platform including power, facilities and staff time, because without that baseline no comparison means anything. Confirm the licence position in writing. Agree the fully loaded internal day rate with finance so every subsequent number uses it.
Months four to six: design and land
This is where a cloud migration pricing forecast meets its first invoice. Build the landing zone, network and identity foundation. Agree the storage tiering table volume by volume. Decide the commitment strategy and write down when reservations will be bought — not now. Migrate the first wave, deliberately the least critical, and reconcile the first invoice against the forecast line by line. That reconciliation is the single most valuable hour of the whole programme.
Months seven to nine: move and stabilise
Run the remaining waves. Keep the dual-running clock visible on a wall, because it is costing £5,667 a month. Right-size after each wave has been live for four weeks. Complete application remediation and the security baseline. Start the training that lets the internal team hold the platform without the supplier, and treat that handover as a change management exercise rather than a documentation drop.
Months ten to twelve: commit and govern
Now buy the reservations, against telemetry rather than against the original design. Stand up the monthly cost review with a named owner. Set budget alerts and anomaly detection. Run the first quarterly optimisation pass and record what it recovered. If you buy platform support, whether internally or through managed IT services, this is when the operating model gets written down rather than improvised.
Cloud Migration Pricing Mistakes UK Businesses Keep Repeating
Comparing a vendor calculator to a partner quote
They are answering different questions. A vendor calculator prices infrastructure; a partner quote prices infrastructure plus the work plus the risk. Putting them side by side and choosing the smaller number is how a business ends up with a platform and nobody to run it. This is a persistent problem in cloud migration pricing conversations because the calculator is free and the quote is not.
Buying the platform before fixing the estate
Moving a badly managed estate to a hyperscaler produces a badly managed estate with a monthly invoice. No cloud migration pricing model survives an estate nobody understands. If patching is inconsistent, backups are unverified and nobody knows what half the machines do, the migration will not fix it and the meter will now be running. Fix the IT infrastructure hygiene first, or scope the fixing into the migration explicitly and pay for it.
Underestimating what stays behind
Almost nobody moves everything. Printers, scales, door controllers, label printers, legacy line-of-business appliances and the one machine with a serial port all tend to remain, which means the comms room, its power, its cooling and its server management burden remain too. A cloud migration pricing model that assumes the on-premises cost falls to zero is wrong by the whole of that residual, and in our experience the residual is rarely under 20% of the original.
Letting the reservation decision drift
The opposite error to buying too early is never buying at all. Estates that migrate on demand and stay there quietly pay 60% more than they need to for years. That drift is the quietest cloud migration pricing failure of all. Put a dated decision in the plan — month ten in the schedule above — and hold someone to it.
Ignoring the second bill
The platform invoice is not the only new cloud migration pricing line. Backup software, monitoring, log ingestion, security tooling and identity licensing all arrive with the migration and all bill monthly. In our model they are £6,400 a year, and they are the line most often discovered in month four. A business that has done its cybersecurity homework will have most of this already; one that has not will meet it as a surprise.
Frequently Asked Questions About Cloud Migration Pricing
Is Azure genuinely cheaper than AWS for a UK business?
On like-for-like Linux compute in the London regions, Azure UK South list prices are 4.8% below AWS, and the gap widens to 11.1% on a one-year commitment and 17.3% on three years because Azure discounts terms more deeply. For a Microsoft-heavy estate with Software Assurance, Azure Hybrid Benefit widens it much further. That is the clearest cloud migration pricing signal in this guide. For a Linux, container or data-engineering estate the difference is small enough that capability, skills and existing relationships should decide it.
How much does cloud migration pricing come to for a 30-machine estate?
Using the routes in this guide, the professional-services fee lands between £87,375 for a direct contractor team and £171,500 for a fixed-price partner engagement, with time-and-materials at £147,000 in the middle. The three-year total for the same estate is £492,645 on Azure. Treat any quote outside those bands as a question rather than an error — it may simply be scoped differently.
Will egress fees make cloud migration pricing unpredictable?
Rarely, below hyperscale. Six terabytes a month — a heavy figure for 140 users — costs £4,366 a year on Azure and £4,913 on AWS, which is 4.4% of the annual platform bill. Egress becomes a genuine design constraint above roughly 50 TB a month, and a genuine commercial one only when you want to leave.
Should we sign a three-year reservation during the migration?
No. Migrate on demand, run for a quarter with real telemetry, right-size, and commit in month ten. It is the most expensive reversible cloud migration pricing mistake available: buying reservations against the shapes you lifted and shifted locks in the oversizing you were trying to remove, and a reservation cannot be undone.
Is hybrid cheaper than full cloud?
For a stable estate with no growth, on the cloud migration pricing figures modelled here, yes — £326,033 against £492,645 over three years. But that result depends entirely on the on-premises platform running on less than 0.595 of a full-time engineer. Above that threshold the answer reverses. Measure your actual administration effort honestly before you rely on it.
What does an Azure or AWS engineer cost in the UK in 2026?
Azure contract rates run at a £525 median from 5,843 quoted rates, AWS at £550 from 4,428, and cloud architects at £600 from a much thinner sample of 227. Those two medians drive most of the people half of cloud migration pricing. Permanently, Azure roles median £65,000 and AWS £72,500 — which is £77,250 and £85,625 respectively once employer National Insurance at 15% and pension are added.
How long should a migration of this size take?
Around 140 professional-services days spread over seven to nine months, including four migration waves and a fortnight of hypercare. Time is a cloud migration pricing input, not a separate question. Compressing it below six months usually means skipping discovery or remediation, and both come back as cost. Our cutover and rollback planning guide covers the final weekend in detail.
What is the single biggest saving available?
Licensing. Azure Hybrid Benefit removed £25,471 a year from the worked example — more than storage tiering, more than right-sizing, and available on day one to anyone already holding Windows Server licences with Software Assurance. It is the highest-return cloud migration pricing action on this page, so check your entitlement position before you check anything else.
References
Save costs with Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances
Azure Savings Plan for Compute
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server Licensing
Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework: Migrate
AWS Compute Savings Plans Pricing
Free Data Transfer Out to Internet When Moving Out of AWS
CMA Cloud Services Market Investigation
Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 on Harmonised Rules on Fair Access to and Use of Data
IT Jobs Watch: Azure Contract Rates
IT Jobs Watch: AWS Contract Rates
IT Jobs Watch: Cloud Architect Contract Rates
IT Jobs Watch: Azure Permanent Salaries
IT Jobs Watch: AWS Permanent Salaries
Flexera State of the Cloud Report
HMRC: Off-Payroll Working Rules for Clients
