Methodology

Where prices come from

Every price is read from the provider's own pricing page and stored with that page's address and the date we checked it. Each number on the site links back to its page. If a price isn't on the official page, or we couldn't read it, it is stored as unverified.

The null rule

An unverified price never appears as a number and is never estimated, by people or by AI. It is left out of every total, and the total is shown as “≥ $X (excludes unverified items)” with the missing items listed. Hetzner's prices load in the browser and haven't been verified yet, so Hetzner shows no numbers.

How changes are reviewed

Once a week a bot reads each pricing page and compares it with the last copy. If the page changed, it saves the difference for review; it never edits a price. A person reads the page, types in any new numbers, and approves. Only then do numbers change, and the change is added to the changelog. AI may summarise a page change for the reviewer; it never produces a number.

How the calculator works

From your pageviews and page weight we work out bandwidth, requests, function invocations, CPU time and memory. Each provider's cost is its base price plus any usage above what's included, at its published rates. Some providers work differently: Netlify converts usage to credits, Railway and Fly.io bill usage only, Cloudflare's free requests are limited per day, and VPS plans are a flat price with a transfer allowance. Each result says whether going over a free limit stops your site (“hard cap”) or keeps billing.

Where an allowance is written in words (for example “1 TB transfer”), we read the number from those words. If the wording changes, that number becomes unverified until a person checks it.

Ranking

Sort order and the “cheapest verified” label are computed from prices and your inputs only. The calculator doesn't receive affiliate or sponsor information, and a test checks that results are identical with them removed.