Methodology & data sources
Transparency is the core of our E-E-A-T: this page documents where our prices come from, how we keep them current, and the exact maths behind every derived figure on the site.
Where the prices come from
Every price is taken from the provider's own published pricing page and captured as a committed, dated snapshot (currently June 2026). We track 10 providers across object storage, egress, compute and managed Postgres. We never invent or estimate a vendor's list price; we copy it and link to the source.
| Source | Refresh cadence | Type |
|---|---|---|
| AWS pricing (S3, EC2/Lightsail, RDS) | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Google Cloud pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Microsoft Azure pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Cloudflare R2 pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Backblaze B2 pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Wasabi pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| DigitalOcean pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Hetzner pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Vultr pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
| Linode / Akamai Cloud pricing | none | Vendor published pricing |
Cadence is shown as "none" because this is a manually-verified static snapshot, not an automated feed. We re-check prices periodically; each page carries a "data as of" date so you can judge freshness.
How derived figures are computed
Some pages and the calculators show derived costs. The formulas are deliberately simple and visible:
- Storage cost = stored GB × the provider's published $/GB-month rate.
- Egress cost = (GB transferred out − the published free allowance) × the $/GB egress rate. Providers with $0 egress (Cloudflare R2, Wasabi) always return $0; Backblaze B2's free allowance scales with stored data (3×) so it is noted rather than modelled as a fixed figure.
- Request cost = (Class A operations ÷ 1,000,000 × $/million) + (Class B operations ÷ 1,000,000 × $/million).
- "1 TB stored / mo" columns = 1,000 GB × $/GB rate, storage only.
These estimates intentionally exclude factors that depend heavily on your architecture: cross-region and inter-AZ transfer, CDN costs, per-operation overhead beyond Class A/B, support plans, and committed-use or enterprise discounts. They are for comparison, not billing.
Currency
Most providers price in US dollars and we use those figures directly. Hetzner prices in euros; we show the original EUR figure and an approximate USD conversion (~1.09 USD/EUR) flagged as approximate, purely so it can sit in the same table. FX rates move, so treat converted figures as indicative.
Limitations
Cloud pricing is complex and changes often. Prices vary by region, tier, commitment and account-level discounts; some figures (RDS, Cloud SQL, Azure) are usage-billed and shown as all-in estimates for a small instance. Always confirm the current price on the provider's pricing page before relying on it. All figures here are estimates, not quotes. See our disclaimer.