This page explains how we collect, refresh, and normalize pricing data.

Data Sourcing

We fetch pricing data directly from official cloud provider APIs:

AWS: Price List API
Azure: Retail Prices API
Google Cloud: Cloud Billing Catalog API
Oracle Cloud: Usage and Billing APIs
IBM Cloud: Cloud VPC & Global Catalog
DigitalOcean: API v2
Alibaba Cloud: OpenAPI pricing catalog
Specialized & GPU Clouds (CoreWeave, Lambda Labs, AI Models, Vector DBs, Cloudflare, Aiven): Tracked through dedicated API integrations and curated static configurations.

Update Frequency

Pricing data is ingested and normalized in automated batch cycles. When an automated ingestion pipeline encounters an error or schema change, the tool falls back to a curated static configuration that is verified and updated manually.

Pricing Calculations

PAYG Baseline: Every price on this platform is a standard On-Demand (pay-as-you-go) public list rate. Reserved instances, spot instances, savings plans, and private negotiated contract rates are not displayed directly in the comparison tables.
Yearly figures: Where a "Yearly" or annual figure is shown, it is simply the on-demand rate annualized (hourly × 8760, or monthly × 12) — serving as a standard pay-as-you-go baseline for architectural cost comparison.
Aggregation: For some comparisons, we average regional prices to give a simplified global view.

Enterprise Contracts & Custom Commitments

While public list rates provide a consistent, standard pay-as-you-go benchmark across all providers, organizations using this platform as a reference can achieve substantially lower rates by committing to long-term consumption or entering enterprise private agreements directly with cloud providers.

Most hyperscale providers offer dedicated contract vehicles with negotiated volume discounts:

AWS: AWS Enterprise Discount Program (EDP) & Private Pricing Agreements (PPA) — Custom tiered discounts in exchange for multi-year spend commitments, alongside AWS Savings Plans.
Microsoft Azure: Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC / MAC) & Azure Enterprise Agreement (EA) — Negotiated monetary commitment contracts unlocking customized pricing across Azure services.
Google Cloud: Google Cloud Enterprise Agreements & Custom Pricing — Tailored enterprise contracts and flexible Committed Use Discounts (CUDs).
Oracle Cloud (OCI): Oracle Universal Credits (Annual UC) — Pre-committed annual spend unlocking significant volume discounts across all OCI IaaS and PaaS offerings.
IBM Cloud: IBM Cloud Enterprise Agreements & Savings — Enterprise savings and committed spend discounts.
Alibaba Cloud: Alibaba Cloud Enterprise Discounts & Purchasing — Dedicated enterprise contracts and volume discount programs for high-consumption accounts.
DigitalOcean: DigitalOcean Enterprise & Custom Solutions — Customized volume pricing, dedicated technical support, and tailored agreements for scaling businesses.
CoreWeave & Lambda Labs: Reserved instances and multi-month GPU cluster reservations offering 20-50% discounts over on-demand rates.

FinOps FOCUS™ Specification Alignment

All pricing records, SKU catalog items, and estimate analysis results align with the open-source FinOps FOCUS™ (v1.0) taxonomy. Raw vendor data is mapped onto standardized fields (ProviderName, ServiceCategory, ChargeCategory, PricingUnit, EffectiveCost, Attributes) so multi-cloud records are queryable and exportable in a vendor-neutral schema.

Data Visualizations

In-Table Micro-Visualizations: The horizontal color bars beneath instance prices represent the relative magnitude of that price compared to the absolute highest price currently displayed in your active filter. The most expensive instance defines the 100% width baseline.
Efficiency Scatter Plots: The Price vs. RAM chart is designed to reveal the "efficiency frontier." Instances grouped in the bottom-right quadrant offer the highest resources (e.g., RAM) at the lowest price within your active dataset.

Last updated: October 2026