A straightforward lift-and-shift AWS migration in India typically costs ₹3 to 15 lakh as a one-time engineering project, while a re-platforming or re-architecture programme runs ₹15 lakh to ₹80 lakh+. On top of that you pay an ongoing AWS bill - usually ₹40,000 to ₹5,00,000 per month for a mid-sized business - which replaces your server hardware, colocation and refresh cycle. The one-time number gets quoted a lot. The monthly number is the one that decides whether the migration was worth it.
Key Takeaways
- One-time migration cost: ₹3 to 15 lakh (lift-and-shift, 1 to 3 systems), ₹15 to 40 lakh (re-platforming with managed databases and containers), ₹40 lakh+ (full re-architecture to serverless or microservices).
- Ongoing AWS spend is the real cost centre. Budget it separately and forecast it for 24 months, not 3.
- Self-estimated waste on IaaS/PaaS spend rose to 29% in 2026 - the first increase in five years - as AI and complex PaaS services entered the mix (Flexera 2026 State of the Cloud Report).
- AWS reports an average 31% infrastructure saving for customers migrating legacy applications, plus a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime (AWS Migration Acceleration Program).
- AWS MAP funding can offset part of your migration cost if you go through a partner - most Indian businesses never ask for it.
- India's public cloud spending is forecast to hit $17.5 billion in 2026, up 28.1% from $13.7 billion in 2025 (Gartner, June 2026) - pricing pressure on migration services is easing as supply grows.
What actually drives AWS migration cost in India
Migration quotes vary wildly because "migration" describes several very different pieces of work. AWS documents seven migration strategies - the 7 Rs: rehost, relocate, replatform, refactor, repurchase, retire and retain (AWS Prescriptive Guidance). Three of them account for most of what you'll actually be quoted for.
Rehost (lift-and-shift) - ₹3 to 15 lakh
You move existing virtual machines to EC2 more or less as they are. Your application code doesn't change. This is the cheapest and fastest route, and it's what most Indian SMEs with 1 to 3 business-critical systems should start with.
Typical scope: discovery and dependency mapping, a secure AWS landing zone (VPC, subnets, IAM, logging), replication using AWS Application Migration Service, a cutover rehearsal, and one production cutover window.
What pushes it toward ₹15 lakh: Windows Server and SQL Server licensing decisions, more than ~30 VMs, or a database that can't tolerate more than a few minutes of downtime.
Replatform - ₹15 to 40 lakh
You keep the application architecture but swap infrastructure components for managed AWS services. Self-managed MySQL becomes Amazon RDS or Aurora. A VM-based app server becomes an ECS or EKS container. Static assets move to S3 behind CloudFront.
This is where most Indian mid-market businesses land, because it removes the ongoing ops burden that made the on-premise setup expensive in the first place. (Choosing between container services? See our guide to AWS ECS vs EKS.)
Re-architect - ₹40 lakh to ₹80 lakh+
You redesign for the cloud: serverless functions, event-driven queues, decomposed services, multi-AZ everything. Justified when the application is a revenue product rather than an internal tool, or when your traffic pattern is so spiky that fixed capacity is genuinely wasteful.
The variables that move every quote
| Cost driver | Low end | High end |
|---|---|---|
| Number of applications | 1 to 3 | 20+ |
| Data volume to transfer | Under 1 TB | 50 TB+ |
| Acceptable downtime | A weekend window | Near-zero, cutover in waves |
| Compliance requirements | None specific | RBI, DPDP Act, ISO 27001, SOC 2 |
| Legacy dependencies | Modern stack | Mainframe, Oracle, unsupported OS |
| Post-migration support | Handover only | 12-month managed AMC |
Compliance is the one Indian buyers consistently underestimate. If you handle payments data or health records, the audit trail, encryption and data-residency work can add 30 to 40% to the engineering effort on its own.
The ongoing AWS bill: what you'll actually pay each month
This is the part that decides ROI, and it's the part most proposals gloss over.
A typical mid-sized Indian business running a web application, a database, object storage and a CDN in the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region lands somewhere between ₹40,000 and ₹5,00,000 per month. Where you sit in that band depends on four things:
- Compute hours. Right-sized instances on Savings Plans cost roughly 40 to 60% less than the same instances on-demand. Committing for one or three years is the single biggest lever you have.
- Data transfer out. Inbound data is free. Outbound is not. High-traffic media sites, reporting APIs and analytics exports can quietly generate a five-figure monthly egress bill that never appeared on an on-premise network.
- Storage class discipline. Logs and backups sitting in S3 Standard instead of S3 Glacier are pure waste.
- Idle non-production environments. Dev and staging running 24x7 when the team works 10 hours a day is a 60% overspend on those environments.
Worth knowing: Flexera's 2026 survey of more than 750 cloud decision-makers found self-estimated waste on IaaS and PaaS spend climbed to 29% - reversing five straight years of improvement - driven by AI workloads and complex new PaaS services. Meanwhile 85% of organisations still name managing cloud spend as their top challenge, even though 63% now have a formal FinOps team. Having the team is not the same as having the discipline.
The practical implication for an Indian business budgeting a migration: assume your first three months on AWS will be 20 to 30% more expensive than your steady-state estimate, because nothing is optimised yet. Build that into the business case rather than discovering it in month two. Our AWS cost optimisation guide covers the levers that bring it back down.
AWS MAP: the funding most Indian businesses don't claim
The AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP) is a structured, three-phase framework that also carries financial incentives - and it is routinely left on the table by businesses that migrate without a partner.
Assess. You run a Migration Readiness Assessment across the six perspectives of the AWS Cloud Adoption Framework - business, people, governance, platform, security and operations - and build a real TCO model. In our experience this runs 2 to 4 weeks; AWS does not publish fixed phase durations.
Mobilize. You close the gaps found in the assessment, build the landing zone, write the migration plan and train the team. Typically 4 to 8 weeks on the engagements we've run.
Migrate & Modernize. Workloads move in waves, performance is validated, and cost and security are tuned post-go-live.
AWS publishes the outcomes it sees across this programme: an average 31% infrastructure saving on migrated legacy applications, 62% more efficient IT infrastructure management, and a 69% reduction in unplanned downtime. Those are vendor-reported figures and should be read as directional rather than guaranteed - but the operational resilience gain in particular is consistent with what we see on client projects.
The funding component flows through an AWS Migration Competency Partner and, in the engagements we've seen, is typically released against documented milestones rather than up front. If you are evaluating an AWS cloud consulting company in Gurgaon, ask directly whether they can originate MAP funding for your project. If the answer is vague, that tells you something.
Why the India market context matters right now
Two things changed the arithmetic in 2026.
Capacity is expanding fast. Amazon plans to invest over US$21 billion in cloud infrastructure in India between 2026 and 2030, expanding data centre capacity in both Hyderabad and Mumbai, as part of a broader $48 billion India commitment (About Amazon India, July 2026). More local capacity means better latency for Delhi NCR users and a stronger data-residency story for regulated workloads.
Demand is outrunning supply of good engineers. Gartner forecasts India's public cloud spending will reach $17.5 billion in 2026, growing 28.1%, with IaaS alone growing 40%. Rapid growth pulls experienced cloud architects toward large enterprise programmes, which is precisely why mid-market migrations get staffed thinly and go over budget.
The takeaway for a business in Gurgaon or Delhi NCR: the infrastructure side is getting cheaper and closer. The scarce, expensive input is architectural judgement - knowing what not to migrate, and what to switch off after you have.
How to budget realistically: a five-step method
- Inventory before you estimate. List every server, database, scheduled job and integration. Anything undiscovered at this stage becomes a change request later at 2× the price.
- Get a TCO model, not a quote. Compare three years of AWS run-rate against three years of hardware, colocation, power, licences, refresh and the sysadmin hours you're currently paying for. If the vendor won't build this, that's a signal.
- Split one-time and recurring in the budget. They come from different pots, and conflating them is the most common way migration business cases fall apart at CFO review.
- Fund an optimisation phase. Reserve 10 to 15% of the project budget for right-sizing in the 60 days after go-live. This is where the 29% waste figure gets clawed back.
- Decide the support model upfront. A migration that lands with no ongoing maintenance and monitoring plan reverts to expensive within two quarters.
All of this is core cloud and DevOps engineering work - the migration plan, the landing zone, and the cost governance that follows.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does it cost to migrate to AWS in India?
A lift-and-shift AWS migration in India typically costs ₹3 to 15 lakh as a one-time project for one to three business-critical systems. Re-platforming to managed services runs ₹15 to 40 lakh, and a full re-architecture can reach ₹80 lakh or more. Ongoing AWS spend is separate and usually falls between ₹40,000 and ₹5,00,000 per month for a mid-sized business.
Is AWS cheaper than running your own servers in India?
Usually, but not automatically. AWS reports an average 31% infrastructure saving for customers migrating legacy applications. Those savings depend on right-sizing instances, committing to Savings Plans and shutting down idle environments. Flexera's 2026 report found 29% of IaaS and PaaS spend is wasted, which is what happens when a migration lands and nobody optimises afterwards.
How long does an AWS migration take?
On our engagements, a single-application lift-and-shift usually takes 4 to 8 weeks end to end and a multi-application replatforming programme runs 3 to 6 months. Under the AWS MAP framework the work is sequenced as Assess, then Mobilize, before any production workload moves - AWS does not publish fixed durations for those phases, but 2 to 4 weeks and 4 to 8 weeks respectively are typical.
What are the hidden costs of AWS migration?
The four that surprise Indian businesses most often are outbound data transfer charges, Windows and SQL Server licensing, AWS Support plan fees, and the parallel-running period where you pay for both on-premise and cloud infrastructure during cutover. Budget 4 to 8 weeks of overlap.
Can I get AWS funding to reduce migration costs?
Yes. The AWS Migration Acceleration Program provides financial incentives across its Assess, Mobilize and Migrate & Modernize phases, released against documented milestones. Funding is originated through an AWS Partner, so you need a partner-led engagement to access it.
Should a small business in Gurgaon migrate to AWS?
If you're running physical servers, paying for a hardware refresh cycle, or struggling with uptime, yes - start with a single workload rather than everything at once. If you're already on well-managed shared hosting with modest traffic, the migration may not pay back quickly enough to justify the disruption.
The bottom line
The honest answer to "what does AWS migration cost in India" is that the project fee is the small number and the run-rate is the big one. A ₹6 lakh lift-and-shift that leaves you with an unoptimised ₹3 lakh monthly bill is a worse outcome than a ₹12 lakh replatform that lands at ₹1.2 lakh a month. Ask any prospective partner for the three-year TCO, not the quote - and ask what happens in the 60 days after go-live.
Codevibe designs and delivers AWS infrastructure for businesses across Gurgaon and Delhi NCR - cloud architecture design, VPC and container builds, CI/CD pipelines and post-migration cost optimisation. Talk to us about a migration readiness assessment.