How much will your cloud migration actually cost?
The independent cloud migration cost calculator. No vendor bias, no lead forms. Plan your source-to-destination roadmap with neutral 2026 numbers, including the hidden costs most teams forget to budget.
- ▸ Source-to-destination flow for on-prem, AWS, Azure, GCP
- ▸ One-time + ongoing cost split, not just running cost
- ▸ Egress, parallel running, retraining, contingency
- ▸ Break-even month vs staying on the source platform
Source · From
Destination · To
Total project cost · low / typical / high
Post-migration monthly
$60K
vs current monthly
$80K
Break-even
86 mo
Indicative timeline · 9 months
Estimate based on published 2026 list pricing for AWS and industry-typical per-workload labour rates. Actual costs depend on committed-use discounts, partner credits (AWS MAP, Azure FastTrack), and your specific workload mix. Validate with your provider before commit.
What goes into the estimate
Six cost categories make up almost every cloud migration budget. The proportions shift by strategy and provider, but the categories do not.
| Category | What it covers | % of total (typical) |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment & planning | Workload inventory, dependency mapping, target architecture | 5–10% |
| Labour & professional services | Internal engineers + partner consulting | 35–55% |
| Tooling & licensing | Migration tools, refactor licences, cloud-native software | 5–15% |
| Data transfer / egress | Egress out of source, ingest into destination | 3–10% |
| Parallel running | Both source and destination live during cutover window | 15–30% |
| Contingency | 20–25% buffer for re-architecture and downtime | 10–20% |
Three paths, three cost profiles
The strategy you pick changes your bill 3–5×. Lift-and-shift is cheapest upfront but loses on a 3-year horizon; refactor is the most expensive sprint but the cheapest run. Most enterprises land on a mix.
Rehost
Rehost (Lift-and-Shift)
Move workloads as-is to cloud with minimal modification.
- Per workload
- $3K–$8K
- Timeline
- 2–4 wk
- 3-year TCO Δ
- +10%
- Risk
- Low
Best for: Legacy apps, tight timelines, early cloud adoption
Replatform
Replatform
Targeted optimisations, move to managed services without full re-architecture.
- Per workload
- $8K–$25K
- Timeline
- 4–12 wk
- 3-year TCO Δ
- -15%
- Risk
- Medium
Best for: Databases, mid-life apps, teams with some cloud skills
Refactor
Refactor / Re-architect
Rebuild application to be cloud-native, microservices, serverless, containers.
- Per workload
- $25K–$80K
- Timeline
- 12–52 wk
- 3-year TCO Δ
- -40%
- Risk
- High
Best for: Strategic apps, microservices targets, high-traffic consumer apps
Same scenario, three providers, three numbers
Reference scenario: Standard Mid-Market (100 servers, 20TB, 12 months). Three-year totals include compute, storage, egress during migration, partner consulting, and support plans, with provider discount programmes applied where they qualify.
Destination · AWS
Widest service breadth, mature ecosystem
3-year total
$2.9M
- Compute / month
- $58K
- Storage / month
- $4K
- Egress (migration)
- $18K
- Consulting
- $180K
- Support / yr
- $84K
Destination · Azure
Best for Microsoft shops, hybrid scenarios
3-year total
$2.6M
- Compute / month
- $62K
- Storage / month
- $4K
- Egress (migration)
- $18K
- Consulting
- $165K
- Support / yr
- $74K
- Hybrid Benefit
- $-155,000
Destination · GCP
Strongest for data, ML, Kubernetes workloads
3-year total
$2.5M
- Compute / month
- $51K
- Storage / month
- $4K
- Egress (migration)
- $16K
- Consulting
- $155K
- Support / yr
- $68K
- Sustained-use disc.
- $-183,600
Five costs the vendor calculator will not show you
Most cloud migration estimates are 40–60% understated. These are the line items that blow up budgets. Each is in the live calculator above.
H01
Data Egress During Migration
$50–$92 per TB
Moving data out of your current environment (or between clouds) triggers egress fees.
H02
Cutover Downtime
Revenue × downtime hours
Every hour offline during cutover costs money.
H03
Parallel Running Costs
1.5–2.5× monthly infra spend
During migration you run both on-premise and cloud environments simultaneously.
H04
Staff Retraining
$1,000–$5,000 per technical employee
AWS, Azure, and GCP certifications cost $300–$400 each.
H05
Application Re-architecture Labour
$25,000–$200,000 per app
Apps that seemed simple on-premise often need significant rework for cloud.
By destination, by audience
AWS migration cost →
EC2, MAP credits, DataSync, partner rates
Azure migration cost →
Hybrid Benefit, FastTrack, Expert MSP
GCP migration cost →
Sustained-use, Cloud Migrate, BigQuery
AWS vs Azure vs GCP →
Side-by-side cost on identical scenario
Lift vs replatform vs refactor →
Per-workload table by strategy
Small business migration →
5-50 server scenarios with break-even
ROI / break-even →
When does the migration pay itself back
10 hidden costs →
Detailed playbook with mitigation tips
Best calculators 2026 →
Independent review of 8 tools
Frequently asked
Q. How much does cloud migration cost?
A. Cloud migration costs range from $15K for a 5-server small business to $10M+ for an enterprise data centre. Typical mid-market migrations (100 servers, 20 TB data, 12 month project) land between $1.5M and $3M when you include labour, egress, parallel running, retraining and contingency. The five biggest cost drivers are workload count, migration strategy (rehost vs refactor), data volume (egress), parallel running window, and partner consulting rates.
Q. How long does cloud migration take?
A. Small businesses with 5-20 servers complete migrations in 2-6 months. Mid-market (50-200 servers) typically takes 6-18 months. Enterprise (500+ servers) runs 18-36 months. The timeline directly drives parallel-running cost: every month you run both source and destination environments adds 1.5x to 2.5x your monthly infra spend.
Q. Is cloud migration cheaper than on-premise?
A. Long term, usually yes for replatform or refactor strategies. McKinsey reports median 3-year cloud savings of 30-40% vs on-premise for well-executed migrations. Lift-and-shift on its own is often more expensive than on-premise on a 3-year basis (+5-15% vs baseline) because workloads are not optimised for cloud pricing.
Q. What is the cheapest cloud migration strategy?
A. Lift-and-shift (rehost) is cheapest upfront at $3K-$8K per workload. To minimise total cost: use free migration tools (AWS Application Migration Service, Azure Migrate, Google Cloud Migrate), apply for partner credits (AWS MAP, Azure FastTrack), right-size before reserving capacity, retire workloads before migrating, and ship large datasets physically (AWS Snowball) to avoid egress fees.
Q. What credits are available for cloud migration?
A. AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) provides funding and credits typically covering 25-40% of migration costs for qualifying enterprise migrations. Azure offers FastTrack for Azure (free migration support) and migration funding for Azure Expert MSP-led projects. GCP offers funded migration through Google Cloud Partners. Apply through a partner before formally scoping the project for the strongest position.