About
Somebody should be keeping this record.
Cloud vendors publish their prices, and then quietly edit them. Comparison sites will tell you what a machine type costs today — several of them, well. None of them can tell you what it cost in March, because nobody was keeping the archive.
That gap has a cost. When Google doubled peering and egress rates, the story scattered across small blogs, finance aggregators and a GitHub thread. There was no canonical page for a journalist to link, no history for a FinOps lead to cite, and no alert for the teams whose bills had just moved.
What we do
We snapshot every published cloud and AI list price once a day, diff each day against the last, and publish the result as a permanent, searchable changelog. The changelog is free and always will be. What you can pay for is not having to watch it: pick the SKUs you care about and we email you when they move.
Why the archive is the whole point
Price history cannot be backfilled. Every day of snapshots is a day no later entrant can obtain, which is why the collector shipped before the website did. The code here is a weekend's work for anyone who wants to copy it; the archive is not.
Who is behind it
Cost Ticker is a venture of Finitizer, which builds cloud cost management software. That relationship is stated on every page rather than buried, because it explains both the expertise and the interest: we look at GCP billing exports and LLM usage every day, and the same pricing corpus that powers this site powers our own product's anomaly detection.
It also means we are not neutral about cloud cost — we think most organisations are paying more than they need to. We are neutral about vendors, which is the part that matters for a price changelog. We do not take vendor money to shade a number, and we publish increases and decreases with the same prominence.
Get in touch
admin@costticker.com reaches a person. Corrections, data requests, press questions and “why does your number disagree with my invoice” are all welcome — the last one usually has an interesting answer, and it is covered on the methodology page.
The words we use
This is a specialist subject with a lot of borrowed vocabulary. Nothing here is harder than the plain-English version, so here is the plain-English version.
- SKU
- One priced line item — a specific thing, in a specific region, sold by a specific unit.“An n2-standard-4 core-hour in us-central1” is one SKU. “An m5.xlarge instance hour in eu-west-1” is another. A single cloud has roughly a hundred thousand of them, which is why a price change can matter enormously and still go unannounced.
- list price
- The price a vendor publishes — not the price you actually pay.Everything on this site is list price. Your invoice may be lower because of committed-use discounts, an enterprise agreement, sustained-use discounts or credits. What list price tells you is the direction the vendor is moving, and it is the only figure that is public and comparable across customers.What this does not cover →
- snapshot
- One complete copy of a vendor’s published price list, taken on one day.A job reads each vendor’s public pricing API once a day and archives the whole catalogue. The archive is the point: price history cannot be backfilled, so a day without a snapshot is a day gone for good.How a snapshot works →
- diff
- The comparison of one day’s prices against the day before, which is how a change is found.The comparison covers the whole pricing structure, not just the headline number. A vendor can leave the first-tier rate alone and reprice every tier above it — the change nobody notices is exactly the one worth catching.How a change is detected →
- changelog
- The running record of every price change found, newest first.
- mover
- A SKU whose price has changed over the window you are looking at.Movers can be ranked two ways, and they give substantially different lists. By money, the biggest movers are accelerator and instance hours. By percentage, they are usually sub-cent items where a fractional adjustment is a large proportion.
- window
- How far back a comparison reaches — 7 days, 30 days, 90 days or a year.A 30-day move compares the price in effect today with the price in effect 30 days ago. Items that did not exist at the start of the window are left out of the ranking rather than counted as an infinite rise.What the percentages mean →
- spot
- Spare capacity, sold cheaply on the condition it can be taken back at short notice.Google calls it Preemptible, AWS calls it Spot. Both are searchable here, and both stay on the page — the vendor’s own word is never overwritten.
- commitment
- A lower rate in exchange for promising a year or three of usage up front.Reserved Instances, Savings Plans and Committed Use Discounts are all this shape. They are shown as a separate pricing model so a committed rate is never compared against an on-demand one by accident.
- FOCUS
- The FinOps Foundation’s shared vocabulary for cloud billing, used here to make vendors comparable.It is what makes a Google service and an AWS service land in the same bucket. Each vendor’s own wording is kept alongside it, because reconciling against an invoice needs the vendor’s word, not a translation of it.How the cross-cloud comparison works →
- egress
- Data leaving a cloud provider’s network — almost always billed, often expensively.
- catalogue
- One priced world this site tracks. Cloud is one; AI model pricing is another.