If you are a Microsoft Azure customer and want to get 24/7 access to technical and billing support for your company, as well as a response time of less than an hour for your critical issues, but you don’t want to pay $300 per month for this, today is your lucky day. Microsoft today announced that it’s dropping the price of Azure Standard Support from $300 per month to $100 per month and that it’s shortening its promised response time for critical cases from two to one hour.

Government customers, too, will see a price drop from $375 per month to $125 per month, as well as the promise of one-hour response times. If you are in Germany, though, you are out of luck as the changes do not apply to you.

Given that virtually all large cloud providers offer the same set of core services (and often at comparable prices), it’s maybe no surprise that we are now seeing some competition around service.

AWS’s Business plan starts at $100 per month and also promises a one-hour response time for when production systems go down, but that’s only that starting price. What you actually pay is a percentage of your monthly AWS usage fees on a slide scale that depends on your monthly AWS bill.

Google currently only offers basic support at $150 per month with the promise of a four-hour response time for business critical issues.

Unlike AWS and Microsoft, Google does not offer a cheaper and significantly more limited “developer” plan for $29 per month.

Update: We initially misread the AWS pricing chart and have updated the post to reflect that.

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