Still paying AWS, Azure or DigitalOcean hundreds a month with few or no customers?

Plenty of products spend their first year with a handful of users and a cloud bill that looks like a real company's. Some of that is the startup credits running out; most of it is the way the big clouds price the boring parts: a managed database at several times the cost of the server under it, and traffic billed per gigabyte. We priced one ordinary stack everywhere, at list prices, so you can see where the money goes.

The stack

One app server with 2 vCPU, 4 GB of RAM, about 80 GB of disk and a public IP; one managed PostgreSQL with 2 GB of RAM and 50-64 GB of storage; 1 TB of traffic out to the internet a month. US East for AWS (us-east-1) and Azure (eastus), on-demand, no reservations or savings plans, 730 hours a month.

Our column is not a smaller stack: the app server has twice the vCPU and RAM of the others, and the database has 6 vCPU and 12 GB against 1-2 vCPU and 2 GB. For $49 you can take the 8 vCPU / 24 GB / 300 GB server instead, which is still less than DigitalOcean's line for a 2 vCPU server and a 2 GB database.

Where the money goes

Traffic. On AWS, 1 TB out is $83.16 at $0.09 per GB after the first 100 GB free; on Azure $73.92; on Railway $51.20. For a small app that is half the bill or more, and it grows with every user you hoped to get. DigitalOcean pools transfer with the Droplet; we include it.

The managed database markup, and its standby. A 2 GB RDS instance is about the price of the app server, and Multi-AZ doubles it. On Azure, the Burstable database tier has no high-availability option at all, so a standby means moving to General Purpose: $259.88 a month for the pair of 2 vCore / 8 GB nodes, plus storage. On DigitalOcean the cheap standby goes away for new clusters on 30 November 2026 (details).

The small things. A public IPv4 address now costs $3.65 a month on AWS and Azure. Disks are separate lines. None of it is big alone; together it is another $15-20 a month for a server you thought cost $24.

What the big clouds give you for it

Managed everything, dozens of regions, compliance paperwork, and a path to very large scale. If you need those, the bill is the price of them. Most products with few customers do not yet; they need one good server, one reliable database with backups, and a bill that does not grow faster than revenue.

What it looks like here

An Ubuntu 24.04 server with root (or a no-root mode), the installs you pick set up for you, free DNS, and a managed PostgreSQL 18 with daily backups, 7-day point-in-time restore, PgBouncer and an optional hot standby. Prepaid from $10, each item paid 30 days at a time from the balance, unused days credited when you delete. If you want to try first: the $1 server is free for 30 days.

Sources

AWS: EC2 on-demand pricing, RDS for PostgreSQL pricing, VPC pricing (public IPv4) and EBS pricing, us-east-1 list prices; Azure: Linux virtual machines and PostgreSQL Flexible Server via the Azure Retail Prices API, eastus; Railway: railway.com/pricing; DigitalOcean: Droplets and managed databases. All checked 30 October 2026; taxes and support plans not included. Our prices are the Germany prices from the pricing page; other regions cost a little more and the order form shows the exact price before you pay.