In Amazon's defense, their pricing is pretty clear and straightforward except for Glacier, which even they admit doesn't follow their pricing model for all the other services.
Google's is still the best though -- they automatically give you "bulk discounts" instead of having to buy them in advance like AWS, and their general philosophy is "your cheapest option should be to finish your workload as quickly as possible", as opposed to AWS, where you have to do some acrobatics to fit into their pricing models efficiently.
You'd think Microsoft would be the go-to provider for SQL Server workloads, but Azure SQL is terribly expensive for some (many?) workloads. For read-intensive SQL Server workloads you'll be paying upwards of $465/mo (Premium P1 [1]) for something that can be easily handled by a beefy VM for a fraction of the price. Also, the Azure SQL pricing model links performance ('eDTUs') to storage which skews the billing model even further.
One thing to keep in mind for Azure SQL: you are getting a guaranteed SLA [1], business continuity and full point-in-time backups (up to 30 days) [2] for that price. To compare effectively you would need to price out a comparable Always-On cluster, domain controllers, SAN storage (for replication), and backup solution + storage.
I highlight a similar pricing breakdown with their IoT / MQTT service and their price inanities as well. As far as I can tell, this insane pricing is for the idea of "Can't go wrong with purchasing Microsoft Services".... when in actuality, you can go very much wrong.
I find the prices pretty straightforward mostly, the portal will give you an estimate of the monthly cost for all your current services. The problem is the data transfer pricing. Say you have a website that has 5000 visits a day, it is really hard to estimate your IN/OUT GB, then do the same for blob storage or other services.
Also, isn't AWS billing per utilization/hour? For small projects this means it is many times cheaper than Azure. Azure is more focused to enterprises than to individual devs.
Yes, and if you were doing anything with the recently killed (or soon to be) RemoteApp, billing there was a disaster. Absolute horrible disaster. Overbilled to my employer because their websites did not equal to what they quoted us. They also refuse to honor enterprise contract regarding transfer (Internet2 peer). Just horrible terrible bad no good.
And their MQTT service (IoT) pricing is a joke. $50/month for 400k messages a day (!second, typo) with a cap of 4k? Seriously? That's just 4.6 messages a second, WITH a data restriction that MQTT itself doesn't have.
I routinely load pictures with motion to "house/frontdoor/motion/" topic in the form of a jpg. MQTT specifies nothing about said data ~ I could even store a dvd VOB for video in a topic.
And this offering is for a max data of 48GB/month. To put this in perspective, a dialup modem(!) Gets a top speed of 5.2KB/s , which sustained across a 30 day month = 43.2GB
I can (and have!) bought a cheap-shit VPS server and installed Mosquitto on it. I can use MQTT as the spec indicates, including Websockets and storing picture data. And it's more on the price range of $40/year, not $600/yr
Reserved instance pricing on AWS absolutely destroys Azure. If you do on-demand on both, they look competitive, but there are ways of bringing AWS down which Azure simply cannot match.
Have you had a chance to look at Google's Preemptible VMs? They're a fixed 70-80% off of list price.
Another point is, Google's VMs are generic CPU/RAM combinations. You don't need "network optimized VMs" or "storage optimized VMs" - you simply get those things on any VM. This makes the "excess instance supply" market much more fluid and simplifies folks' lives.
Google's sustained use discounts for standard (non-preemptible) VMs are a huge win as well. No need to predict usage and reserve instance time in advance; the discount is simply applied progressively as you use a particular instance type more during a month.
That's nice, I'm using azure for a windows vm and it's been super frustrating trying to get reasonable performance. (RAM/CPU/etc. is all great but the standard IO is so slow it's basically unusable (i'm maxing out at 10M/s (I think due to iops limitiations).
Also, there's nobody to contact at Microsoft regarding Azure billing. I was prototyping some app that used App Service, Document DB, and Notification Hub and for a few months they billed at around $10 - $20, all of a sudden it's $1,200 for a month. The app was not launched, I was the only user. There's no way to figure out why other than it's a DocumentDB charge. There's no way I'd put anything in production with Azure.
Then again, AWS is also pretty atrocious as well (just rear Glacier horror stories). But more people understand the pricing with AWS.
I find that Azure is about 1.5x the price of similar services from AWS. I've not looked at GCE.
But those are my experiences. YMMV