The Silicon Valley premium in numbers
What the best-known infrastructure services cost against the cheapest managed alternative, in 17 categories, at the same usage. Sources last checked 2026-10-06 to 2026-10-09.
Key findings
- Across 15 categories, the best-known service costs a median 25× as much as the cheapest managed alternative at the same usage.
- Against the median service in each category rather than the cheapest, the best-known one costs a median 3.1× as much.
- Added up over those 15 categories, the best-known services come to $399,956/yr at our default usage. The cheapest alternatives come to $22,641/yr.
- In none of the 15 categories is the best-known service the cheapest. In 3 of all 17, a managed service is free at this usage.
- Cloudinary has no self-serve price at 50K unique source images / month, 500K transformations / month, 2,000 GB image bandwidth / month (over self-serve plan limits · contact sales), so image processing isn’t in the ratio or totals.
- Auth0 has no self-serve price at 50K monthly active users, no enterprise SSO connections (over self-serve plan limits · contact sales), so authentication isn’t in the ratio or totals.
- AWS, Google Cloud or Azure offer a service in 14 of these categories. Their cheapest option is the cheapest overall in 2 of them.
- A European-owned service has a lower estimate than the best-known service in 14 of 15 categories.
“Best-known” is our pick of the service most teams start with in each category. “Cheapest” uses published or modeled rates only, so rates we had to estimate don’t set the baseline. These are list-price estimates; they leave out features, support, discounts and migration work.