What Extended Support Actually Costs: The Cross-Vendor Pricing Reference for Post-EOL Software
The first cross-vendor pricing reference for post-EOL extended support. Microsoft ESU: $61/device doubling yearly ($30 one-time for consumers). AWS: EKS $0.60/cluster-hour (6x), RDS $0.100/vCPU-hour doubling in year three. Ubuntu Pro: $25 desktop / $500 server per year. And the honest quote-based rows — Red Hat ELS, Oracle, SUSE LTSS, CentOS ELS — where no public price exists. Every figure traced to a vendor price page or our verified coverage. The cross-vendor price table Product What it buys Pricing model Published price (verified 2026-08-12) Source Windows 10 — consumer ESU Critical + important security updates to Oct 12, 2027 Per device, one-time enrollment Free (settings sync) · 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points · or $30 one-time Microsoft consumer ESU page Windows 10 — commercial ESU Yearly security updates, max 3 years (to Oct 2028) Per device, per year — doubles annually, cumulative $61 yr 1 → $122 yr 2 → $244 yr 3 (≈$427 total) · $0 on Azure VMs / Windows 365 / AVD Microsoft ESU documentation Windows Server 2012/R2 ESU Final ESU year ends Oct 13, 2026 — then nothing, at any price Per year, via volume licensing or Azure Arc 100% of the full license price, each year — no year discount · $0 on Azure Per our analysis of Microsoft's ESU FAQ Amazon EKS 12 more months of Kubernetes version support Metered per cluster-hour — enrollment automatic, no opt-in $0.60 /cluster/hr vs $0.10 standard (6x) — ≈$438/mo vs ≈$73/mo per cluster AWS EKS pricing page Amazon RDS (MySQL / PostgreSQL) Up to 3 years past end of standard support Metered per vCPU-hour — enrollment automatic unless disabled $0.100 /vCPU-hr yrs 1–2, $0.200 yr 3 (AWS US East example rate) — Multi-AZ pays per instance AWS RDS pricing page Ubuntu — ESM (Ubuntu Pro) +5 years of patching past LTS standard support (20.04 to Apr 2030, 22.04 to Apr 2032) Per-machine subscription Free up to 5 personal machines · $25 /desktop/yr · $500 /server/yr (unlimited VMs) — support plans extra Canonical's Ubuntu Pro pricing page