How We Estimate Costs

Our goal is to make prices from different providers as comparable as possible. Part of Our Data, the overview of where the site's numbers come from.

Keep in mind these are examples for common use cases, not quotes. Your actual costs will differ based on utilization, reserved instances, discounts, and other factors we haven't accounted for.

Assumptions

All estimates use the same baseline:

• A month is 30 days (720 hours).
• We use the region closest to North Virginia (USA) or Frankfurt (Germany).
• We ignore temporary promotions and special discount programs.
• All prices are shown in USD. Where a provider publishes in another currency we convert at the European Central Bank's daily reference rate. We currently track prices published in EUR, SEK, CHF, ISK and INR.

Reference configurations

Outside of GPUs, we compare providers against these reference configurations. Each one links to the full specification we price against.

Not every provider offers these exact configurations. When they don't, we pick the closest available option. For example, if a provider offers 14 GB and 24 GB of RAM but not 16 GB, we pick the 14 GB option.

How we place VPS plans into Small, Medium, and Large

Specs come first. For each size, we list the provider's plan that's closest to the reference configuration. Price doesn't move a plan out of its size: a 2 vCPU plan belongs in Small even if it's expensive, and the table will show that.

Some providers don't offer anything near the Small reference. Their entry-level plan might already start at 4 vCPU. We may still list that plan in the Small column when both of these are true:

1. Its specs aren't far above the category (roughly up to 4 vCPU and 8 GB RAM).
2. Its price is in line with the other Small entries.

We do this because the tables are meant to show how much you get at comparable price points. If a provider's cheapest plan gives you 4 vCPU for the price of a 1 vCPU plan elsewhere, that's a comparison worth showing.

Each plan appears in one size only. When a provider's entry-level plan moves into Small this way, their next tiers map to Medium and Large. This means the same column can show different specs across providers, depending on where a plan sits within that provider's own lineup.

If a provider has no plan reasonably close to a reference and no plan that qualifies for the smaller category by price, we leave that entry out rather than force a bad match.

Reference specifications

The exact configuration we price for each service. Where a provider doesn't offer one, we pick the closest option rather than force a bad match.

VPS Instances and Managed Containers

• x86_64 architecture, if available
• Linux (Ubuntu)
• No minimum ephemeral storage

Block Storage

• At least 100 GB of SSD storage
• At least 3,000 IOPS, if available
• At least 100 MB/s throughput, if available
• No snapshots

Object Storage

• Provider's standard storage class (no infrequent access or reduced redundancy)
• 1 TB of data stored
• 100 GB of data transferred in
• 250 GB of data transferred out
• 1,000,000 GET requests
• 100,000 PUT or POST requests
• 1,000 lifecycle transition requests

Managed PostgreSQL

• 1 node, 2 vCPU, 4 GB RAM
• At least 50 GB storage
• No replication
• No minimum backup retention
• 10 GB read per month
• 5 GB written per month

Managed Redis®*

• 1 node, 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM
• 10 requests per second
• 1 KB average request size

Load Balancers

• TCP protocol
• At least 1 node, 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM
• At least 200 Mbps throughput
• 1,000 new connections per second
• 1 second average connection duration
• 1 TB data processed per month
• 3 targets, 3 rules

Serverless Executions

• 25M invocations
• 150 ms of execution time
• 512 MB of memory

Egress / Outbound Data Transfer

• 1 TB of data transferred out per month
• The destination region is the same as the source region (either US East or EU Central, see assumptions above)
• Using the provider's default network class
• No free tier allowances or discounts

GPU pricing

We track 4475 GPU configurations from 73 providers, covering 105 GPU models.

GPU Instances

• One listing is one instance: a GPU model, how many of them, and the CPU, RAM and disk that come with it
• The hourly price is the provider's published rate for the whole instance
• Monthly and per-second rates are normalized to hourly, using the same 720-hour month
• We also show a per GPU per hour rate: the instance price divided by the GPU count, so an 8x H100 at $24.00 / hr is $3.00 / GPU / hr
• Price is one of several ranking factors, not the ranking. Each pricing panel explains its own order

GPU Billing Types

• On-demand: pay as you go, no commitment
• Reserved: a lower rate in exchange for a minimum term
• Spot: cheaper because the provider can reclaim the instance
• Custom: quote-only, with no published rate to compare

What a GPU Rate Covers

• The instance as the provider lists it
• We don't add separately billed services like storage, egress, public IPs or support, unless the provider already includes them in the rate
• No free allowances subtracted

GPU Availability

• In stock: available at the time of verification
• Waitlist: expected to be available soon
• Out of stock: unavailable at the time of verification
• Not reported: the provider publishes no status

GPU Specs

• Specs are resolved per form factor, not per model
• An H100 PCIe has roughly 2 TB/s of memory bandwidth and no NVLink; the SXM part has 3.35 TB/s and 900 GB/s of NVLink