Cost guide
What the cloud actually costs an Indian business — migration once, the bill forever
By Samuel Marndi · Updated
The short answer
A small Indian business website and database on AWS typically costs ₹8,000–₹25,000 a month in the Mumbai region — one or two instances, a managed database, storage and data transfer. A real production workload with several instances, a database, load balancer and backups runs ₹40,000–₹1,50,000 a month. A single small site or app can sit as low as ₹3,000–₹8,000.
Migration itself runs from about ₹2,00,000 for a simple move to ₹50,00,000 for a large estate. A mid-sized lift-and-shift — roughly 50 virtual machines and 20 TB — commonly totals ₹14,00,000–₹21,50,000 across assessment, execution and three months of post-migration tuning. But the migration is a one-off you can negotiate. The monthly bill is permanent, and it is where cloud projects are actually won or lost.
What the monthly bill looks like
These are Indian market figures for the AWS Mumbai region in 2026, and Azure's equivalent tiers land close enough that the choice rarely turns on price. The step between bands is not gradual — it is the point at which you stop running a website and start running a system that has to stay up.
Migration cost, by what you are actually moving
| Scope | Typical cost | What dominates it |
|---|---|---|
| A website and database | ₹50,000 – ₹2,00,000 | Mostly setup and testing; often a weekend |
| A handful of applications | ₹2,00,000 – ₹8,00,000 | Dependencies nobody documented |
| Mid-size lift-and-shift | ₹14,00,000 – ₹21,50,000 | Assessment ₹8–12L, execution ₹4–6L, tuning ₹2–3.5L |
| Re-architecting rather than lifting | ₹20,00,000 upwards | Application rework, not infrastructure |
| Assessment only | ₹75,000 – ₹3,00,000 | Worth buying separately before committing to anything |
Is cloud actually cheaper than the server you own?
Often not, and anyone who answers this without asking about your workload is selling. A server sitting at steady load 24 hours a day, already bought, in a building you already pay for, is frequently cheaper to keep than to replace with an equivalent cloud instance running the same hours.
What cloud genuinely buys is elasticity, someone else's responsibility for the hardware, and the ability to stop paying for something the day you stop using it. If your load is flat and predictable, you are paying a premium for flexibility you will never exercise.
The honest cases for moving are specific: your hardware is at end of life and replacement is a capital request; you need remote access and multi-site working; your load is spiky or seasonal; you have no one to maintain physical equipment; or you need disaster recovery that a single office cannot provide.
| On-premise server | Cloud | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost shape | Large capital outlay every 4–6 years | Monthly operating cost, forever |
| Steady 24×7 load | Usually cheaper | Usually more expensive |
| Spiky or seasonal load | You pay for the peak all year | You pay for what you use |
| Hardware failure | Yours to fix, and yours to stock spares for | Someone else's problem |
| Remote and multi-site working | Needs VPN and a good uplink | Works by default |
| Scaling down | Impossible — the hardware is bought | Immediate |
| Who needs to understand it | Someone who knows servers | Someone who watches the bill |
Where the money leaks, in every environment I audit
Cloud waste is remarkably consistent. Most environments carry 20–40% that could be removed without anyone noticing a difference in service, and it is almost always the same six things.
- Over-provisioned instances. Sized for a launch-day guess and never revisited. Right-sizing against actual usage is the single biggest win available.
- Development and staging running 24×7. Nobody works at 3am. Scheduled shutdown of non-production environments alone routinely saves a quarter of the bill.
- Orphaned storage. Disks detached from deleted instances keep billing indefinitely. So do old snapshots nobody has a policy for.
- On-demand pricing for steady workloads. Anything running permanently should be on a committed plan — commonly 30–50% cheaper for the identical resource.
- Data transfer nobody modelled. Egress is the line that surprises people, especially with a chatty application or a media-heavy site.
- Logs and backups with no retention policy. Kept forever by default, billed forever accordingly.
What to establish before anyone quotes a migration
- What are you actually running — every application, its dependencies, and who owns it?
- What is your current all-in cost, including hardware amortisation, power, cooling and the time someone spends maintaining it?
- What will the monthly cloud bill be at steady state, modelled rather than estimated?
- What is the rollback plan if the migration goes badly, and how long does it stay available?
- Who holds the cloud account, and is billing visible to you rather than to a vendor?
- What happens to the old hardware — sold, repurposed, or sitting in a room still drawing power?
FAQ
Related questions
How much does AWS cost per month in India?
A single small site or app runs ₹3,000–₹8,000 a month in the Mumbai region. A typical small-business website with a managed database sits at ₹8,000–₹25,000. A production workload with several instances, a database, load balancer and backups runs ₹40,000–₹1,50,000. Data transfer is the line most often underestimated.
How much does cloud migration cost in India?
From about ₹50,000 for a single website and database up to ₹50,00,000 for a large estate. A mid-sized lift-and-shift of roughly 50 virtual machines and 20 TB commonly totals ₹14,00,000–₹21,50,000 once assessment, execution and three months of post-migration tuning are counted. Buy the assessment separately first.
Is cloud cheaper than buying a server?
For steady, predictable 24×7 load on hardware you already own, usually not. Cloud wins on elasticity, on removing hardware responsibility, and on the ability to stop paying when you stop using something. If your load never varies, you are paying a premium for flexibility you will not use — and I will tell you that rather than quote the migration.
AWS or Azure for an Indian business?
The technical difference matters far less than two practical things: what your team already knows, and what licences you already hold. A business deep in Microsoft 365 and Windows Server usually lands better on Azure through licence benefits alone. Otherwise AWS has the broader service range and the larger hiring pool in India.
Why did our cloud bill go up without us doing anything?
Almost always storage and data transfer rather than compute. Snapshots and logs accumulate under no retention policy, orphaned disks keep billing after their instances are deleted, and egress grows quietly with traffic. A one-off audit usually finds 20–40% that can be removed with no change to service.
Can you reduce our existing cloud bill without migrating anything?
Usually yes, and it is the cheapest engagement on offer. Right-sizing instances, scheduling non-production environments to shut down overnight, moving steady workloads to committed pricing, deleting orphaned storage and setting retention policies typically removes 20–40% without touching the architecture.
Who should own the cloud account?
Your business, with billing visible to you. Cloud accounts registered under a vendor's organisation are a recurring problem: you cannot see real usage, you cannot verify the markup, and moving providers becomes a migration in itself. I set accounts up in your name with your card and take access you can revoke.