The Bill You See vs the Bill You Pay
AWS has over 100 separate billing dimensions. Most developers only look at the EC2 line item. That's often less than half their actual spend.
Before you can fix your cloud costs, you need to understand them. This is a structured walkthrough of every cost category that bites developers — with real numbers.
Category 1: Compute
This is the one people pay attention to. Still, there are traps:
| Instance | AWS On-Demand | AWS Reserved (1yr) | Spot (avg) | RAW Bare Metal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2 vCPU / 4GB (t3.medium) | $30 | $18 | $9 | $0 |
| 4 vCPU / 8GB (t3.xlarge) | $120 | $73 | $36 | $11 |
| 8 vCPU / 16GB (t3.2xlarge) | $240 | $146 | $72 | $21 |
| 16 vCPU / 32GB (m6i.4xlarge) | $617 | $373 | $185 | $36 |
| 32 vCPU / 128GB (r6i.8xlarge) | $1,613 | $975 | $485 | $279 |
AWS on-demand prices, us-east-1, April 2026. Spot prices are averages — they vary and can be interrupted. Reserved requires 1-year commitment and upfront payment.
Note: even the best AWS Reserved pricing is 2-8x more than bare metal. And Reserved means you've committed capital upfront with no flexibility.
Category 2: Egress (The Hidden Tax)
AWS charges you to take your own data out of their network. This is the most genuinely predatory pricing in the industry.
| Data Transfer | AWS Cost | GCP Cost | Azure Cost | RAW Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First 1 GB/month | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 1 GB – 10 TB | $0.09/GB | $0.08/GB | $0.087/GB | $0.00 |
| 10 TB – 50 TB | $0.085/GB | $0.06/GB | $0.083/GB | $0.00 |
| 50 TB+ | $0.07/GB | $0.05/GB | $0.07/GB | $0.00 |
| 1 TB/month (real cost) | $90 | $82 | $89 | $0 |
Egress pricing excludes transfers to other AWS services (those have their own costs). RAW includes unlimited outbound traffic on all plans.
Run the math on your actual data transfer. If you're serving a SaaS to real users, you're probably pushing 500GB–10TB/month. At AWS prices, that's $45–$900/month in egress alone.
Category 3: Storage
Disks aren't free on cloud:
| Storage Type | AWS EBS gp3 | AWS S3 | GCP Persistent | RAW (included NVMe) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100 GB | $8/mo | $2.30/mo | $8.50/mo | Included |
| 500 GB | $40/mo | $11.50/mo | $42.50/mo | Included |
| 2 TB | $160/mo | $46/mo | $170/mo | ~$8/mo extra |
| IOPS provisioned (5000) | +$290/mo | N/A | +$200/mo | $0 (NVMe native) |
AWS EBS IOPS: gp3 includes 3,000 IOPS. Additional IOPS cost $0.005/IOPS/month. NVMe bare metal has 500K+ IOPS natively with no extra charge.
AWS IOPS pricing is particularly brutal for database workloads. A busy Postgres instance needing 10,000 IOPS pays $350/month just for disk access. On NVMe bare metal, that's zero.
Category 4: Database Services
Managed databases are the biggest cost multiplier in cloud bills:
| Database | AWS RDS (Multi-AZ) | PlanetScale | Supabase | Self-hosted on RAW |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Postgres (4 vCPU / 16GB) | $544/mo | — | $25/mo | $11/mo |
| MySQL (4 vCPU / 16GB) | $471/mo | $39/mo | — | $11/mo |
| Redis (26GB) | $258/mo | — | — | $11/mo |
| Automated backups | +$0.095/GB | Included | Included | $0 (rclone to B2) |
AWS RDS Multi-AZ db.r6g.xlarge. Self-hosted via Docker Compose with automated pg_dump to Backblaze B2 (~$1/month for 100GB of daily backups).
Category 5: Support
AWS Support is quietly one of the most expensive line items nobody talks about:
| Support Tier | AWS Cost | What You Get |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $0/mo | Documentation only. No human contact for technical issues. |
| Developer | $29/mo min (3% of bill) | Business hours, 12-24hr response. No phone. |
| Business | $100/mo min (10% of bill) | 24/7, 1hr critical response. Still no TAM. |
| Enterprise | $15,000/mo min | Dedicated TAM, 15-min critical response. |
Business support at 10% means a $1,000/month AWS bill = $100/month just for support access. A $10,000/month bill = $1,000/month.
Build Your Real Number
Here's the formula. Take your current AWS bill and work through each category:
Real-World Examples
What companies at different scales actually pay vs what they'd pay on bare metal:
| Company Type | AWS Bill | RAW Equivalent | Annual Savings |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS (50K users) | $1,800/mo | $180/mo | $19,440 |
| Dev agency (10 clients) | $600/mo | $60/mo | $6,480 |
| Startup (Series A) | $8,000/mo | $800/mo | $86,400 |
| Data pipeline | $3,200/mo | $320/mo | $34,560 |
Estimates based on real migrations. Individual results vary by workload. RAW uses Hetzner hardware in Frankfurt and Helsinki.
When Cloud Pricing Is Worth It
Fair is fair. Cloud premium pricing makes sense when:
- Burst scaling is unpredictable. If Black Friday traffic is 100× normal and you can't overprovision, AWS Auto Scaling earns its cost.
- Multi-region failover. AWS Route 53 + multi-region ALB is genuinely good infrastructure that's hard to replicate cheaply.
- Compliance. Some regulated industries (healthcare, finance) need specific certifications that bare metal providers don't yet offer uniformly.
- Time is money. If your engineering team's time is expensive and managed services buy time, the premium might be worth it — temporarily.
Try It
See what your workload would cost on bare metal. Free tier includes 2 vCPU, 4GB RAM, unlimited egress, NVMe storage.
$ npx rawhq deployDeploy Free Server →