AWS Alternatives for Teams That Outgrew the Bill

Nobody leaves AWS because it stopped working.

They leave because the bill grew faster than the business, because a workload that runs flat out all month is being billed as though it might need to triple tomorrow, or because the finance team asked a question about next quarter that engineering could not answer.

If that is the situation, the useful question is not which provider is cheapest. It is which parts of your estate are actually mispriced, because the answer is usually some of them rather than all of them.

Before you look at alternatives

Three checks, and they take an afternoon between them. Skipping them is how organisations migrate a whole estate to save money on a third of it.

Profile utilisation. You are looking for shape, not size. Workloads running consistently high with low variance are paying an elasticity premium for capacity they never release. Workloads that are genuinely spiky are getting what they pay for.

Find the waste first. Flexera's 2026 State of the Cloud Report put estimated wasted cloud spend at 29 percent. Idle instances, orphaned volumes, forgotten NAT gateways at roughly $32 a month each before processing, and unattached IPv4 addresses at $0.005 an hour all add up. If a third of the bill is buying nothing, moving providers moves the waste with it. We covered the audit process in cloud cost optimization.

Check your architectural dependencies. Every proprietary managed service in the stack is a rewrite. An application on PostgreSQL, Redis and containers moves. An application on DynamoDB, Lambda and Step Functions gets rebuilt.

That third one decides more migrations than price does.

Six alternatives, and what each is for

Other hyperscalers

Azure and Google Cloud are the obvious move and frequently the least useful one. The pricing models are structurally similar, egress is billed the same way, and the same elasticity premium applies to the same workloads.

Where it makes sense is a specific commercial or technical reason: existing Microsoft licensing that makes Azure cheaper in practice, or a service that genuinely has no equivalent. Moving hyperscaler to hyperscaler for cost alone rarely delivers what people expect.

Second-tier cloud providers

DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode and OVH offer simpler pricing, often more generous transfer allowances, and considerably less surface area.

They suit smaller estates and teams that want VMs, block storage and a load balancer without the service catalogue. What you give up is depth. If you depend on managed services with no equivalent, you will be building and operating them yourself.

Managed private cloud

Dedicated hardware, operated by someone else, usually at a fixed monthly rate.

Suits steady-state workloads at scale, where the elasticity premium is pure cost and the operational burden of running your own is unwanted. Does not suit genuinely variable demand, and does not suit teams who want to control the platform layer themselves.

Bare metal and dedicated servers

The lowest cost per unit of compute available and the highest operational load. Everything above the hardware is yours.

Makes sense for predictable, compute-heavy or storage-heavy workloads where you have the team. Does not make sense as a way to avoid thinking about infrastructure.

Colocation

Your hardware, someone else's facility. Only worth considering at scale and with existing operational capability.

Worth noting that the 2026 hardware market has moved against this. Hardware costs rose an estimated 15 to 25 percent, faster than cloud price increases, with DRAM contract prices for 16Gb DDR5 chips going from $6.84 in September 2025 to $27.20 by December. A business case built on 2024 hardware pricing needs rebuilding.

Staying, and fixing the bill

The option most comparison articles omit.

If your estate has never been through a proper audit, has no commitment discounts against a stable baseline, and has not been rightsized, the available saving without changing anything is often larger than the saving from switching. Commitment discounts alone run from around 30 percent for a one-year Savings Plan with no upfront up to roughly 72 percent for a three-year all-upfront term.

Migrating an unoptimised estate is expensive work that produces a smaller number than optimising it in place.

The egress problem specifically

Data transfer deserves separate treatment, because it is the charge most often behind a decision to leave and the one people understand least.

On AWS at US-region list prices, internet egress is free for the first 100 GB per month, then $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB, $0.085 for the next 40 TB, $0.07 for the next 100 TB, and $0.05 above 150 TB. Transfer between availability zones runs $0.01 per GB in each direction. Cross-region typically $0.01 to $0.02.

Two things make this structurally different from other cloud costs.

It scales with your product succeeding rather than with your infrastructure decisions. A media platform or an analytics product with heavy export can find transfer charges growing faster than revenue, and no configuration change fixes it.

And it makes leaving more expensive the longer you stay, because moving a dataset out is billed in proportion to its size. That is worth knowing before it becomes urgent.

The three questions that decide it

What shape is the demand? Steady and high favours dedicated infrastructure. Variable and unpredictable favours staying where elasticity is the product.

What would have to be rewritten? Count the proprietary managed services in the stack. That number is your real migration cost and it dwarfs the licensing arithmetic.

Who operates it afterwards? Bare metal and colocation transfer the operational load to you. Managed options do not. Pick the one that matches the team you have rather than the one you would like to have.

Frequently asked questions

What is the cheapest alternative to AWS? Bare metal or dedicated servers, on cost per unit of compute. They are also the highest operational burden, so the cheapest infrastructure is not always the cheapest total.

Is Azure or Google Cloud cheaper than AWS? Not structurally. The pricing models are similar and the same elasticity premium applies. Differences come from specific service pricing, existing licensing relationships, and negotiated commitments rather than from list rates.

Should I leave AWS to save money? Only after auditing. With estimated waste at 29 percent of cloud spend and commitment discounts often uncovered, the saving available without moving is frequently larger than the saving from moving.

What are AWS egress fees? Charges for moving data out of AWS, at $0.09 per GB for the first 10 TB each month from US regions after a 100 GB free allowance, with separate rates for cross-AZ and cross-region transfer.

How long does an AWS migration take? It depends on architectural dependencies rather than VM count. Workloads on portable components move quickly. Workloads built on proprietary managed services require rewriting, which is a development project rather than a migration.

Can I move part of my estate instead of all of it? Yes, and that is what most organisations actually do. Hybrid is the common outcome of an honest workload-by-workload evaluation, not a compromise.

Where InMotion Cloud fits

We sell managed private cloud, so this is the interested party speaking.

The profile we suit is a steady-state estate that has already been rightsized and is still expensive, run by a team that does not want to operate hardware. Dedicated infrastructure, fixed monthly cost including an egress allowance, and someone else handling the platform layer.

The profile we do not suit is variable demand, or an application built substantially on proprietary AWS services, where the migration is a rewrite and should be evaluated as one.

If you want the comparison run against a specific workload rather than the estate, our pricing calculator will do it, and our team will go through the architectural dependencies with you before anyone talks about price.