CloudCostDB Blog
Deeper looks at how AWS pricing and instance types got where they are, with numbers to back it up.
LatestThe S3 retrieval tax: when cheaper storage classes cost you more
Standard-IA is 46% cheaper per GB than S3 Standard, until you read anything. Every class below Standard trades a storage discount for per-GB retrieval fees, minimum durations, and request costs up to 25x higher. The breakeven math for all six classes, from our dataset.
September 13, 20262026
- September 2, 2026Five architectural rules to cut your AWS networking billCompute is straightforward to budget, but data transfer, NAT Gateways, and public IPv4 fees produce persistent surprise bills. Five practical rules to eliminate network waste without compromising reliability.
- August 31, 2026How the AWS geography tax splits by serviceWe priced the same reference stack in 13 AWS regions: an m6i.xlarge, a MySQL RDS instance, a Redis cache, 1 TB of gp3, 5 TB of S3 Standard, and 60 DynamoDB write capacity units. Every service carries its own regional markup, and they disagree with each other.
- August 1, 2026Graviton versions: from experiment to defaultGraviton1 (2018) was an experiment nobody was sure about. Graviton2 made Arm a mainstream choice, and each generation since has shifted the price-performance math. The story of all five generations, with numbers from our data.
- May 18, 2026The burstable CPU credit trap: when T instances cost more than MT2, T3, and T4g instances look like the cheapest compute on AWS until sustained CPU load triggers T Unlimited surcharges at $0.05 per vCPU-hour. How the credit accounting works, when credit burn breaks the budget, and the exact crossover points to M-series.
- April 2, 2026ALB vs NLB pricing: LCU math and the cost of Layer 7 load balancingApplication Load Balancers and Network Load Balancers share an identical base rate of $0.0225/hour, but their capacity unit calculations diverge dramatically under high-throughput traffic. The math behind LCUs vs NLCUs, gRPC/WebSocket costs, and when to terminate at Layer 4.
- February 14, 2026The NAT Gateway trap: how $0.045 per gigabyte inflates your cloud billManaged NAT Gateways are AWS's default recommendation for private subnet egress, but at $0.045/hour plus $0.045 per processed gigabyte, high-throughput architectures routinely incur surprise bills in the thousands. How the pricing works and how to bypass it.
2025
- November 10, 2025The AWS geography tax: why São Paulo costs 59% more than VirginiaIdentical virtual machines running identical silicon carry wildly different hourly prices across AWS regions. A breakdown of the global price spread across 38+ regions, why certain locations charge a massive premium, and the math behind multi-region architectures.
- September 20, 2025The three-way CPU race: how AMD flipped the script on EC2The old rule of thumb was simple: Intel was default, AMD was 10% cheaper, and Graviton was 20% cheaper. In the 7th and 8th generations, AMD Genoa turned that pricing model upside down. Benchmarks, clock speeds, and real cost per compute unit.
- August 4, 2025Cross-AZ data transfer: the silent tollbooth in multi-AZ architecturesHigh availability across Availability Zones is an AWS best practice, but inter-AZ network traffic costs $0.01 per GB in each direction ($0.02/GB round-trip). How microservices, Kafka replication, and Kubernetes clusters rack up thousands in hidden data transfer bills.
- June 15, 2025The gp2 to gp3 storage tax: why millions of volumes never migratedIn December 2020 AWS launched gp3 at a 20% storage discount with decoupled IOPS and throughput. Years later, unmigrated gp2 volumes still generate huge unintended cloud spend. The history, the baseline math, and why AWS left migration up to you.
- April 10, 2025The RAM per dollar curve: how C, M, R, and X families price memoryCompute-optimized, general-purpose, and memory-optimized instances charge drastically different effective rates per gigabyte of memory. The math behind the memory curve, why buying RAM on M-instances wastes money, and sizing formulas for memory-bound workloads.
- January 22, 2025Local NVMe vs EBS: why the 'd' suffix is AWS's best storage dealAdding local NVMe SSDs to EC2 instances costs pennies per hour while delivering hundreds of thousands of IOPS and sub-100µs latency. How instance storage economics compare against gp3 and io2, and the architectural patterns for ephemeral storage.