AWS vs GCP vs Azure for UK app startups: cost and fit

If you are building an app in 2026, the AWS vs GCP vs Azure question lands early, usually the moment a developer asks where you want to host. For a UK startup it is a decision with real money attached, because the cloud is where your app runs, where your bill accrues every month, and where a surprising amount of future flexibility is either kept or quietly signed away. The honest answer is not that one provider wins. All three are excellent and will run a typical app comfortably. What actually separates them for an early-stage UK team is the starter credits, how fast costs climb once you have traction, where your data physically sits, and how painful it would be to move. This comparison walks through each on the terms that matter to a founder, not an infrastructure engineer.

AWS vs GCP vs Azure: the short answer

For most UK app startups in 2026, any of the three big clouds is a safe choice, and the decision comes down to your team’s existing skills and your starter credits rather than raw capability. AWS is the broadest and most widely known, so hiring and finding help is easiest. Google Cloud tends to feel simplest for a small team shipping a modern app quickly. Azure is the natural fit if you already live in the Microsoft world or sell to enterprises that do. All three run UK data regions, so residency is not a reason to rule any of them out.

That is the skimmable version. The reasoning behind it is worth understanding, because this choice shapes your monthly bill, how easily you can hire, and how locked in you become.

What the three clouds actually are

AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure are the three dominant public clouds. Each rents you computing power, databases, storage, and dozens of managed services on demand, so a small team can run a serious app without owning a single server. For an app startup, you will realistically use a handful of their services at first: something to run your code, a database, file storage, and a way to send notifications. Everything else is there when you grow into it.

AWS is the oldest and largest, with the widest catalogue of services and the deepest pool of engineers who know it. Google Cloud is known for a cleaner developer experience and strong data and machine learning tooling. Azure is built around tight integration with Microsoft’s ecosystem, so if your team already uses .NET, Windows, or Microsoft 365, a lot of it will feel familiar. For a plain app build, the practical differences between them are smaller than the marketing suggests.

Starter credits: what a UK startup gets for free

This is where the AWS vs GCP vs Azure comparison matters most at the very start, because for your first year the right credits can mean your cloud bill is close to zero. All three offer a free tier plus startup programmes with meaningful credits, and for an early UK team those credits often cover the whole MVP phase.

Each provider runs a free tier that covers small always-on usage, plus starter credits for new accounts, and separate startup programmes that grant much larger credits to funded or accelerator-backed companies. The exact figures change, so check the official pages rather than trusting a blog: AWS pricing and free tier, Google Cloud pricing, and Azure pricing. If you are in an accelerator or have raised, apply to AWS Activate, Google for Startups, and Microsoft for Startups, because the credits there are large enough to matter for a year or more.

The practical takeaway is that credits should not drive your architecture, but they can reasonably break a tie. If two providers are equal on everything else and one is handing your funded startup a five-figure credit, take the credit. Just do not build something you will regret because a provider paid you to.

Where the bill actually comes from

The sticker price of a cloud is not the compute, it is the parts founders forget: data transfer out, managed database fees, and the slow creep of services nobody turned off. An idle app costs very little on any of the three. A growing app bills you for traffic leaving the cloud, for every managed convenience you switch on, and for storage you never clean up.

The single most common surprise on a UK startup’s cloud bill is egress, the fee for data leaving the provider’s network. Serving images, video, and API responses to users all counts, and it is priced per gigabyte on all three clouds. The second is managed databases and serverless functions, which are wonderful because someone else runs them and expensive precisely because someone else runs them. None of this is a reason to panic. It is a reason to put a billing alert on your account on day one, which all three support, and to check it monthly. We wrote about how running costs stack up beyond hosting in our breakdown of what an app actually costs to build in the UK, and the same discipline applies to the cloud line specifically.

The honest framing is that AWS, GCP, and Azure are within a rounding error of each other on raw cost for a small app. Where teams overspend, it is almost never because they picked the wrong logo. It is because nobody owned the bill.

Data residency and UK compliance

For any UK app handling personal data, where that data physically sits is a real question, and the good news is that all three clouds answer it well. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure all operate data centre regions in the UK, specifically around London, so you can keep user data in the country if you choose to.

Keeping data in a UK or European region makes it far simpler to demonstrate how you meet your obligations under UK GDPR as set out by the ICO, because you control and can prove where personal data lives and who can reach it. For most consumer apps this is straightforward: pick a UK or Irish region when you set up, and you are in good shape. For regulated products in fintech or healthtech, residency and the paperwork around it become a bigger part of the decision, and it is worth getting explicit advice rather than assuming a default region is enough. The point for the comparison is simple: residency does not favour one of the three clouds over the others, because all three give you a UK footprint.

Lock-in: how hard is it to leave

Every cloud wants to keep you, and the difference between the three is not whether there is lock-in but where it hides. The plainest, most portable path on any of them is to run standard, open technologies, so that moving means changing where things run rather than rebuilding what they are.

Lock-in on AWS, GCP, and Azure comes mainly from their proprietary managed services. If you build on a plain container and a standard Postgres database, you can move that setup between all three with real but manageable effort. If you wire your whole app into a provider’s bespoke serverless, queuing, and identity products, you get enormous convenience and a much harder exit. Neither choice is wrong. The mistake is making it by accident. This is the same tension we unpacked for the layer above the cloud in Firebase vs Supabase vs a custom backend, and the lesson carries over: convenience early is worth it, as long as you know which conveniences would be expensive to unwind.

Side-by-side comparison

Here is how the three compare on the dimensions that actually affect a UK founder’s decision, rather than a benchmark chart. All three are production-grade, so this is about fit, not who is better.

The pattern in that table is the whole decision in miniature. The clouds are close on cost and capability, so you are really choosing on team familiarity, hiring, and which starter programme will fund your first year.

What to do next

Choosing between AWS, GCP, and Azure matters less at the start than founders fear and more over time than developers sometimes admit. For most UK app startups the right move is to pick the cloud your team already knows, take whichever startup credits you qualify for, keep your data in a UK or Irish region, and put a billing alert on the account before you write a line of code. Lean towards standard, portable technologies so that a future move is a change of address, not a rebuild.

The best version of this decision is made alongside the people who will build and run the app, because the right answer depends on your team, your product, and your obligations, not on a league table. If you are weighing your options and want an honest read on which cloud fits your app and how to keep the bill sane, send us a project brief and we will tell you straight, including the cases where the cheapest sensible answer is the one your developers already use every day.