The Silicon Valley premium, priced
Enter your usage and see what 237 services across 18 categories, from DNS and CDNs to LLM APIs, would charge. Filter by parent-company jurisdiction and EU data residency, and find a migration guide if you decide to switch. Every service links to the vendor’s pricing page and the date we last checked it.
Virtual and dedicated servers priced by capacity and outbound traffic. Check CPU performance and regions, not just vCPU count.
16 services
What DNS costs for your zones and queries, from basic hosting to enterprise traffic steering.
11 services
Bandwidth and request charges add up differently at each CDN. Audience location and content terms matter too.
10 services
Image resizing and format conversion, billed by originals, transformations, bandwidth or a shared credit pool.
14 services
Storage is only part of the bill. Download traffic and request fees can decide where it’s cheapest to keep your files.
14 services
A cheaper build minute doesn’t always mean a cheaper build. Test job times, caching and runner sizes.
11 services
Password resets, receipts and other transactional mail. Rates vary with volume, templates, support and delivery tools.
14 services
Sending a code costs one fee; managing the verification can add another. Carrier fees and retries also count.
11 services
Login, MFA and SSO costs depend on active users, enterprise connections and the features in your plan.
18 services
Some search vendors bill per request and record; others bill for cluster size. Test relevance and peak load before switching.
11 services
Logs and host monitoring, with separate charges for indexing, retention and queries. APM and custom metrics can add more.
16 services
Displaying maps and looking up addresses. Check free allowances, tile counts and whether you can store the results.
13 services
Input and output token rates across model providers. A small model may be enough for your task; test it on real inputs.
14 services
One API for several model providers, with routing and logging. Check subscriptions, credit fees and model markups.
7 services
Transcription prices for recorded audio. Streaming, speaker labels and specialist vocabulary may cost extra.
14 services
Synthetic voices priced by characters, tokens or audio time. Listen for pronunciation and check latency and voice rights.
16 services
Text, tables and layout from documents. Page-priced APIs and token-priced vision models need different cost assumptions.
14 services
Translation APIs and LLM alternatives, priced by characters or tokens. Test your language pairs and terminology.
13 services
Each pair is estimated at the same usage. The services don’t include the same things, and the note under each pair says what differs.
Sources last checked 2026-10-06 to 2026-10-09. Estimates exclude some costs and can change. How we compare.
Managed services are sorted by estimated cost, lowest first. Affiliate links, if any, don’t affect the order. See how we calculate costs or read about the project.
“The Silicon Valley premium” is our shorthand for the extra you may pay for a familiar infrastructure vendor. Some of that difference buys support, certifications, features and a track record. Some may reflect packaging, sales overhead or the convenience of staying put. A price table cannot isolate those causes or tell us the vendor’s production cost. It can show which alternatives are worth investigating.See the premium in numbers, category by category.
The name doesn’t mean US vendors always cost more. At our default usage, a US-based company has the lowest estimate (or ties for it) in 16 of 18 categories. In 4 categories the highest estimate is from a non-US company. Ownership and data residency are separate questions, with their own filters.
Traffic, requests, active users and hosts can all add to your bill. Some vendors charge for each one; others bundle them into the price. Object storage is a useful example:
50 TB stored, 20 TB egress to internet / month, 10M writes / month, 100M reads / monthAmazon S3$35,778/yrWasabi Hot Cloud Storage$4,794/yr7.5× estimated bill gap, mostly egress fees. Wasabi has an egress fair-use cap and minimum storage-duration terms.A verification API and a messaging API can both send an SMS, but only one manages the verification flow. The extra fee pays for work you’d otherwise have to do yourself. Both products below are from Twilio and use the same carriers:
100K verifications / month, US numbersTwilio Verify$75,120/yrTwilio Programmable Messaging (DIY OTP)$15,120/yr5.0× estimated bill gap. DIY OTP excludes engineering and fraud costs; the managed fee buys generation, expiry and screening.Small language and vision models offer another way to translate text, parse documents or transcribe audio. Lower API costs do not guarantee equivalent output or a cheaper production pipeline. Both examples below are Google products:
50M characters / monthGoogle Cloud Translation$11,880/yrGemini 3.1 Flash-Lite (via Gemini API)$323/yr37× modeled bill gap. The LLM estimate assumes a token-to-character ratio; quality review and retries are extra.Startup credits can make AWS, Azure or Google Cloud an easy first choice. Moving later takes work, even after the credits run out. This example uses on-demand prices, without committed-use discounts:
32 vCPUs, 128 GB RAM, 10 TB egress to internet / monthAWS EC2$24,864/yrHetzner Cloud (dedicated vCPU)$7,561/yr3.3× estimated bill gap with dedicated vCPUs on both sides, but different regions, CPUs and surrounding services. Disks and discounts are excluded.One vendor charges per host, another per compute-hour. Comparing them means translating your usage into both billing systems. Replacing a proprietary API takes engineering time too, which can make staying put easier even when the bill is higher.
Some of the hardest bills to compare are negotiated, not published. Enterprise contracts can also change the commitments, support and features you are buying. Check your contract for:
28 vendor pages here show what companies report paying, with sources.
The cheapest row isn’t always the right one. Stay where you are when:
A higher bill can be worth it. You should be able to explain what the extra money buys.
Move records and search settings to Typesense, connect your InstantSearch UI through an adapter, and compare relevance before switching traffic.
Move users and passwords, set up production Keycloak, and update your apps to use it. Includes staged cutover and the limits of rolling back to Auth0.
Check your AWS dependencies, build the Hetzner network and servers, copy data, and switch traffic. Plan database rollback separately from DNS.
Send telemetry to both platforms with Grafana Alloy, rebuild dashboards and alerts, and verify coverage before retiring Datadog.
Rebuild voices and streaming calls, check pronunciation and audio formats, and run a blind listening test before a staged rollout.
Try Ubicloud on one workflow, check images and caching, and compare cost per build. Use a repository variable to switch back without a commit.