Case studies
What moving actually saves.
Three bills, opened line by line.Most case studies show a percentage and hide the arithmetic. These do the opposite: the full before table, the full after table, the trade-offs that cut the other way, and a dated methodology so you can check every number yourself.
One team left AWS RDS for managed PostgreSQL, one left ClickHouse Cloud for managed ClickHouse, and one studio collapsed 13 droplets into two project servers plus a managed MySQL. Different stacks, same pattern: pay the base rate plus a flat margin, get the ops included, stop paying for idle.
Pick your stack
Three stacks,
re-priced in the open.
Two RDS Postgres instances, Multi-AZ, RDS Proxy, backups, a staging box that never slept. Rebuilt shape for shape on managed PostgreSQL, us-east-1 on both sides of the table.
Customer-facing dashboards needed 16 GB replicas and HA, which on ClickHouse Cloud means the Scale tier. That made the bill $892 a month. The same shape bills $335.
A German studio ran every client on its own droplet: 13 meters, a backup tax on each, two managed databases holding a few hundred megabytes. Two project servers replaced the lot.
How we count
Numbers built
to be checked.
Every before table uses the vendor's public list prices, checked August 2026 and quoted per line in the footnotes. No estimated discounts, no straw men.
Cloud prices move by region, so every comparison names the region on both sides. Recompute it where we did and you get what we got.
Selfhost.dev prices are our all-in billed rates, plus a public IPv4 at deploy, about $5/mo. The same math lives in the pricing calculator.
Client profiles are anonymized and normalized; the stacks, sizes, and every price are stated in full on each page so the math stands on its own.
Case study number four could be your bill.
Send us what you run and what it costs. Our founder reads every audit request and replies personally, usually within about 2 days, with the same line-by-line teardown. No signup required.