Pricing Methodology

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
• DigitalOcean: API v2
• Alibaba Cloud: OpenAPI pricing catalog

Update Frequency

Pricing data is fetched automatically on a weekly basis. When a live fetch fails, the tool falls back to a curated static configuration that is updated manually.

Pricing Calculations

• PAYG only: Every price on this platform is a standard On-Demand (pay-as-you-go) hourly rate. Reserved instances, savings plans, and other committed-use pricing are not tracked.
• Yearly figures: Where a "Yearly" or annual figure is shown, it is simply the on-demand rate annualized (hourly × 8760, or monthly × 12) — not a distinct reserved or committed-use rate.
• Aggregation: For some comparisons, we average regional prices to give a simplified global view.

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: August 2026