Methodology
Pricing data and price-performance methodology
How cloud list prices are collected, normalised to vCPU-hour, GB-hour and GPU-hour, kept in original currencies, and combined with benchmark results.
Version 1.0 Updated:
Scope
- On-demand list prices for compute, GPU, block and object storage published by each provider
- Normalisation to price per vCPU-hour, GB RAM-hour, GPU-hour, GB of GPU memory and TB/s of GPU bandwidth
- Billing granularity, minimum charges and what keeps billing when resources are stopped
- Price-performance once measured benchmark results exist
Collection
Every price is stored with the source URL, the access date, the region, the currency and whether tax is included. Prices come only from the provider’s own pricing pages or calculators. Estimates, third-party aggregators and negotiated prices are not used.
Normalisation
- Unit prices. For compute families, a least-squares fit of hourly price = a × vCPU + b × GB RAM gives implied prices per vCPU-hour and per GB-hour. The fit and its residuals are shown on provider pages.
- GPU-hour. Where a provider prices multi-GPU instances, the per-GPU figure is used only if the provider publishes it or the instance contains only GPUs and fixed host resources priced as one unit; the basis is stated.
- Memory and bandwidth. GPU-hour price ÷ GPU memory (GB) and ÷ memory bandwidth (TB/s) give first-order capacity and decode-cost proxies.
Currencies
Prices remain in the currency the provider publishes. Cross-currency rankings are not computed, because exchange rates change faster than the data is reviewed. Charts group bars by currency.
Billing granularity
Per-second, per-minute and per-hour billing are recorded with minimum charges. For short jobs, the effective price can be much higher than the hourly rate on coarse billing; pages note this where relevant.
Price-performance
Price-performance (for example output tokens per second per currency unit, or cost per 1M tokens) is calculated only from verified benchmark results combined with the list price valid on the run date. No price-performance figure is published from specifications alone.
Review cycle
Prices are re-checked at least monthly and whenever a provider announces changes. The access date on every price shows when it was last confirmed.
Limitations
- List prices exclude discounts, commitments, spot capacity and credits.
- Tax treatment differs by provider and customer location.