Swiss sovereign cloud TCO vs AWS and Azure: a 36-month sketch

Compute, egress, support, foreign exchange, nFADP compliance: the five lines the AWS and Azure calculators do not show. The calculation below covers a Swiss SME profile over 36 months, with its assumptions, formulas and sources published so that you can redo it with your own.

According to Flexera (State of the Cloud 2025), cloud cost is the top concern of IT leaders for the fifth year running, cited by 83% of them. What that statistic does not say: most organisations underestimate their real bill by 40 to 60%, because the AWS and Azure calculators only show compute.

Five lines make up the real cloud TCO for a Swiss company, egress, production support, the European region surcharge, USD/CHF exchange risk, and nFADP compliance. They are systematically absent from initial quotes. Over 36 months they often add up to more than the compute itself.

This article compares three providers over thirty-six months. If you first want to understand the first of those lines, egress fees explains it and shows its effect on a monthly invoice. For your own quantities, the TCO calculator.

The five lines the AWS and Azure calculators do not show

1. The European region surcharge

AWS regularly advertises its rates on the us-east-1 (Virginia) region. The same m6i.large instance in eu-central-1 (Frankfurt) costs around $96 a month instead of around $70: a surcharge of roughly 37% (source, cloudprice.net, May 2026). Azure applies the same mechanism. Quotes presented in tenders almost always use US rates as their base. The region closest to Switzerland, eu-central-1 for AWS and West Europe for Azure, is structurally more expensive.

2. Egress fees

$0.09 per outbound GB at AWS and Azure, after the first 100 GB free each month. For 3 TiB of monthly outbound traffic, less the 100 GiB allowance, that is $267 a month, absent from the compute quote. Over 36 months: $9,629, or CHF 8,474. At Hikube, egress is not billed: CHF 0 in this TCO comparison. This hyperscaler line is covered in detail in our article on the real cost of AWS S3 storage for a Swiss company.

3. Production support

Developer support at AWS and Azure starts at $29 a month. The Business tier, required for any production environment with a guaranteed SLA, starts at $100 a month and rises to 3-10% of the total monthly bill. On a $2,000 monthly bill, support adds $60 to $200 a month. It is rarely included in the initial estimates presented to the board.

4. USD/CHF exchange risk

AWS and Azure bill in USD. For a Swiss SME whose revenue is in CHF, a 10% move in the exchange rate shifts the IT budget by the same proportion, without a single byte of the workloads changing. In 2025, USD/CHF volatility reached 8-12% in some quarters. A cloud billed in CHF turns that variable risk into a predictable fixed cost.

5. The cost of nFADP compliance

This line calls for three distinctions that are routinely merged. The nFADP work that falls to you — register of activities, a processing agreement compliant with art. 9, informing data subjects — exists whoever hosts you, a Swiss provider included: it is your obligation, not something you buy, and location does not perform it on your behalf. What varies between providers is the extra file a transfer abroad demands under art. 16. And since 15 September 2024 that file is no longer automatic for the United States: the Federal Council recognised an adequate level of protection for companies certified under the Swiss–US Data Privacy Framework, so a transfer to a certified entity requires no additional safeguards. Check entity by entity on the official DPF list, because certification names a company, not a group. The CLOUD Act is a separate question: it concerns access by US authorities, not the transfer regime, and an adequacy decision does not neutralise it. With Hikube the operator is Swiss (Hidora SA) and the data sits in Geneva, Gland and Lucerne, so there is no transfer abroad to document, but your own nFADP work remains untouched, within the framework described on the security and compliance page, not an additional certification. This is not legal advice. For a full account of these nFADP obligations tied to your cloud provider, our dedicated article covers the three applicable articles of law.

36-month TCO calculation: a scenario, not a quote

The figures below describe one profile under stated assumptions. This is not the price of AWS or Azure: it is what this scenario yields with these assumptions. All of them are listed below, with the formulas, so that you can redo the calculation with your own. Before any commercial use, read the unit prices off the vendors' own pages on the day you calculate: they move, and the readings below date from May 2026.

Scenario assumptions

What makes the three columns comparable

This is where a TCO comparison is won or lost, and what most comparisons quietly skip. The Hikube SKU at CHF 0.18 per GiB-month is network NVMe already replicated in three copies across Geneva, Gland and Lucerne, inter-site traffic included: there is no extra line to stack. The two hyperscalers do not work the same way.

On AWS, an EBS volume lives in a single Availability Zone. Three copies therefore means three volumes, plus the replication layer you install and run yourself, plus the traffic between zones. Charging for one gp3 volume against three Hikube copies would compare a service with a third of a service.

On Azure, a managed disk in ZRS is synchronously replicated across three zones, each in a distinct physical location, and it is billed as a single disk. The Azure column is therefore not multiplied: its per-GiB price is already the price of three copies. That is why it looks higher than AWS gp3.

Two things stay outside the calculation, both in the hyperscalers' favour. IOPS are not compared: Hikube publishes no IOPS catalogue, and on AWS, going beyond the 3,000 baseline IOPS of a gp3 volume costs $0.005 per provisioned IOPS-month, not counted here. And three Availability Zones of the Frankfurt region are not three cities a hundred kilometres apart: matching the geographic spread of Geneva, Gland and Lucerne would call for cross-region, dearer than the cross-AZ used here. The AWS figure below is a floor, not a ceiling.

Formulas

Compute = instance count × monthly price × 36
AWS storage = (3 × usable GiB × price per GiB-month) + (GiB changed per month × 2 destinations × cross-AZ rate), all × 36
Azure storage = usable GiB × ZRS price per GiB-month × 36
Hikube storage = usable GiB × 3xReplicated SKU price × 36
Egress = (GiB out per month − free allowance) × price per GiB × 36
Support = tier rate × monthly bill (compute + storage + egress) × 36

Cross-AZ charges are billed per GiB transferred, not per GiB stored: only the volume changed within the month crosses zones, hence the change rate among the assumptions.

Unit prices, nature and source

"Reading" means a price read off a pricing page on a given date. "Estimate" means a reconstructed value, not verified line by line with the vendor. "Contractual rule" means a billing rule, not an amount.

How to redo the reading

Every unit price in the table takes a few minutes to read at the vendor's, and reading it beats believing us. Here is the exact path, page by page.

1. AWS compute: EC2 On-Demand page, region "Europe (Frankfurt)", OS "Linux", family m6i, size large. The price is hourly; multiply by 730 for the month.
2. Azure compute: Virtual Machines Linux page, region "West Europe", Dv3 series, size D2s v3, "Pay as you go". Same hourly conversion.
3. AWS storage: EBS page, gp3 section, Frankfurt region. Read two numbers: the volume's GiB-month, and the provisioned IOPS beyond the 3,000 baseline.
4. AWS transfer: EC2 On-Demand page, Data Transfer section. Read inter-zone and out-to-internet, plus the monthly free allowance.
5. Azure storage: Managed Disks page, ZRS redundancy, West Europe region.
6. Azure transfer: Bandwidth page.
7. Support: AWS Support and Azure Support, production tier, percentage and monthly floor.
8. Hikube: pricing page, the instance SKU and the Block Storage 3xReplicated SKU.
9. Foreign exchange: the rate of the day, written into your assumptions as we write ours.

The two aggregators cited above, cloudprice.net and instances.vantage.sh, only serve to date an order of magnitude. They are not authoritative and no quote should be built on them. If your reading differs from ours, yours is the one that counts: prices move, and ours date from May 2026. For a full estimate both vendors publish their own tool, calculator.aws and the Azure calculator.

Scenario result, in Swiss francs

Every amount is converted to CHF at the stated rate, the dollar readings included, so that no total mixes two currencies. Change rate: 10 % a month.

① No compliance surcharge is charged to the US providers in this calculation, now that companies certified under the Swiss–US Data Privacy Framework benefit from an adequacy recognition. If the entity you contract with is not on the list, add the documented-safeguards work of art. 16 para. 2 nFADP, which we estimated at CHF 1,500 to 3,000 per year. And in all three columns your own nFADP work — register, processing agreement, informing data subjects — is not counted: it is owed whoever hosts you.

Under these assumptions, Hikube comes out 40 % below AWS and 26 % below Azure over 36 months. The gap does not come from compute, which is near identical, but from three lines: the third copy billed three times on AWS and included elsewhere, egress not billed on Hikube, and support included.

What moves the calculation, and what does not

The change rate, readily placed at the centre, barely moves anything once the copies are counted properly. At 100 % a month instead of 10 %, the AWS total goes from CHF 130,470 to CHF 136,893 and the gap from 40 to 43 %: the dominant term is tripling the volume, not the traffic between zones.

What really tips the result is how many copies you need. A single gp3 volume, in one zone, with no replication, brings the AWS storage line down to CHF 32,440 and support to CHF 5,308, a total of CHF 58,387 over 36 months. On that profile Hikube costs 33 % more than AWS. Same profile, same unit prices, one parameter changed: redundancy.

Two other parameters weigh as much. A one- to three-year commitment takes the compute line down by 30 to 60 % on the hyperscalers, which this on-demand calculation does not reflect. And a design based on snapshots copied between regions, rather than continuous replication, costs markedly less on AWS — at the price of an RPO counted in hours rather than minutes: that is no longer the same service, and it is exactly the substitution an honest comparison has to refuse.

This result therefore does not apply to every profile. A workload with no egress, no personal data and no need for three-site redundancy will find a lower price on AWS or Azure. The rule stands: write your assumptions down, check that you are comparing the same service on both sides, calculate the five lines, and do not mistake the compute line for the total.

What the AWS and Azure calculators will never tell you

Three lock-in mechanisms raise the real cost of migration once the infrastructure is in place.

The first is the Reserved Instances and Savings Plans trap. One-to-three-year discounts look attractive: 37 to 72% off depending on the commitment (third-party order of magnitude: costgoat.com, May 2026; primary schedules on AWS Savings Plans and Azure Reserved Instances). But every commitment ties the organisation to a frozen architecture. A migration decided mid-commitment creates an opportunity cost over the remaining months. The right moment to evaluate a migration is before renewal, not after.

The second is the proprietary ecosystem. Every native AWS or Azure service added to the architecture (RDS, Lambda, Cosmos DB, Azure Functions) raises the cost of migrating to another provider. A provider built on open standards, an S3-compatible API for storage, standard Kubernetes for compute, preserves portability and keeps competitive pressure on your cloud contract.

The third concerns the European Data Act, whose date is routinely moved three years forward. Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 entered into force on 11 January 2024 and has applied since 12 September 2025. Its Article 29 sets out a gradual withdrawal: from 11 January 2024 to 12 January 2027 a provider may still charge switching fees, capped at the costs it directly incurs for the operation. Only from 12 January 2027 does any switching charge become prohibited, migration egress included. There is therefore no obligation to make it free today: there is a cap and a deadline.

Two limits of scope bear on a Swiss calculation. The regulation targets switching charges, not day-to-day outbound traffic: your production egress stays billed at list price, before and after 2027, and it is production egress that weighs on 36 months. And it is EU law: Switzerland is outside, so whether a Swiss customer is covered depends on the entity it contracts with. Check the contract rather than assume.

What does exist already are commercial policies, unilateral and revocable. AWS has offered free data transfer out to the internet for customers leaving AWS since 5 March 2024, to all its customers worldwide and from any of its regions; the request goes through support for approval, and the move must be completed within 90 days. Azure offers free egress for leaving the platform, the first 100 GB per month already being free for everyone and the rest granted as a credit on request. Not to be confused with its at-cost transfer for parallel multicloud use, which is restricted to billing addresses in the EEA, EFTA and the United Kingdom. In both cases this is a migration window the provider opens, not a lower running cost and not an enforceable right.

Migrate to a Swiss cloud or stay on AWS/Azure: the decision rule

Evaluate a migration now if:

, Monthly egress volume above 3-5 TB
, Personal data of Swiss residents in production
, Reserved Instances or Savings Plans contracts up for renewal within 6 months
, A regulated sector (finance, healthcare, legal) with a documented nFADP obligation

Stay on AWS/Azure if:

, Workloads critically dependent on proprietary services with no standard equivalent
, A Reserved Instances commitment in progress with a high exit cost
, Very low egress and no Swiss personal data in production

In every case, the full TCO calculation deserves to be done before each commitment renewal, not after. The five lines described in this article take 30 minutes to estimate with the public rates of the providers concerned.

Summary

The real cloud TCO for a Swiss SME includes five lines absent from initial quotes: the European region surcharge, egress, production support, USD/CHF exchange risk, and nFADP compliance. Over 36 months those lines often make up 40 to 60% of the real bill. The right moment to calculate: before the next Reserved Instances renewal, not after.

Your next cloud renewal is coming. The Hikube team supports Swiss companies in calculating their real cloud TCO and evaluating migration scenarios. Calculate your TCO with our team →