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Pricing Methodology

Every estimate on this site is derived from publicly available on-demand list prices. If an official API and a service pricing page disagree, we treat the service pricing page as the source of truth, as the providers themselves document.

Calculators never hard-code prices in the UI. They read a published, validated JSON snapshot. A failed sync keeps the previous snapshot live.

Calculation rules

These rules are implemented in the calculation engine and shown on result pages:

  • Currency: English UI defaults to USD; Chinese UI defaults to CNY using a mid-market FX rate (informational, not a tradable quote).
  • Taxes are never included.
  • Free tier is included by default. You can turn it off to budget as if the allowance is already consumed.
  • A month is 730 hours unless you change it.
  • GB vs GiB is converted explicitly. The assumption is visible next to the result.
  • CPU models (vCPU, GHz-s, duration) are not treated as equivalent across providers. We flag the difference.
  • Uncovered costs (logging, databases, extra network features) are called out, not silently zeroed.
  • Stale prices hide the result rather than showing an old number.

Data sources

  • AWS: Price List Bulk API / official offer files (On-Demand, USD).
  • Azure: Retail Prices API (public retail, no Dev/Test or reservation prices).
  • Google Cloud: Cloud Billing Catalog API (public list prices).
  • Cloudflare: versioned manual entries checked against official pricing pages (R2, Workers, and documented transfer).
  • DigitalOcean: official Droplet pricing page (Basic plan monthly cap, included transfer).

Validation and rollback

Each sync fetch is stored, hashed, schema-validated, and compared to the previous version. Negative prices, empty SKUs, non-official source domains, sudden catalog drops, free-tier changes, or a Golden SKU moving more than 20% require a human check. Until that check passes, the site keeps the last good publish.

Estimates are not invoices

Your bill can differ because of taxes, credits, private pricing, data-transfer patterns, CDN hit ratios, request mix, storage class transitions, and rounding. Use this site to understand the shape of the cost — then confirm on the provider invoice.