How we make money, and what it cannot buy

What we take money for

Some links to a provider's own site may pay us a commission when someone signs up. That is the only rail currently contemplated, and at the time of writing no programme has been applied to or accepted, so no link on this site is currently monetised.

We do not sell placement in the comparison table. We do not sell a higher rank, a badge, a 'recommended' label, or a review. If that ever changes, it changes on this page first and on the same day.

What the ranking is computed from

The order of the table is the scenario infrastructure bill, ascending, and nothing else. It is a pure function of the price dataset and the workload you selected.

The production ranking function receives no commercial field. Deployable records carrying an affiliate, referral, commission, payout, or sponsor field at any depth fail the prebuild, as does any other top-level field the ranking-input schema has not explicitly reviewed. A separate adversarial test reverses hypothetical commercial values and requires both the scenario-price order and the decision-model order to remain identical.

• Compute for the plan and instance count you chose
• Mandatory platform fees and seats the vendor charges regardless of usage
• Storage beyond what the plan includes, when you ask for storage
• The disk that comes with an instance, where the provider bills it separately
• Egress beyond the included allowance
• A public IPv4 where the plan does not include one
• The managed Kubernetes control plane, where the provider charges for it

What the ranking is never computed from

Anything commercial. Also anything we cannot source: an unknown charge stops a row from being ranked at all rather than being quietly treated as zero, which is the single most common way a price comparison lies without anyone deciding to.

• Whether a provider pays us, or could
• Your team's time. Eleven cloud estimators were reviewed and none prices the buyer's labour by default. Team cost is a separate, optional calculation with a rate you type in
• Tax, which is specific to you
• Any charge we could not confirm from the vendor's own published page

How to check all of this yourself

Every price carries the URL it was read from and the date it was read. Open the link, read the number, and tell us if it is wrong. The corrections page explains how, and corrections are published with a date rather than edited away silently.

The public CSV and JSON files expose aggregate coverage counts, not provider price rows or retained history. The complete retained set still drives the human comparison, calculators and provider pages, where each displayed price keeps its provider source and checked date.

Check the public files and their coverage limits, or report a source or calculation error with the affected scenario.

• Every row links the vendor page its price came from
• Every row carries the date that page was read
• The CSV and JSON routes report retained, current, non-ranking, plan and reference-meter counts
• Rows we will not price are listed with the exact missing input, not hidden