Hosting cost review
Find out what your SaaS is really paying for.
A senior .NET engineer goes through your AWS or Azure bill line by line, names the items that are driving it, and gives you a straight answer on whether moving is worth it — including when it isn't. One hour, $80, no commitment.
Book the $80 ReviewWhere the money usually goes
Four line items account for most of the gap between what a SaaS pays and what it needs to pay.
Compute you're paying for but not using
Instance families sized for a launch that never came, autoscaling floors set in a panic, dev and staging environments running at production size around the clock.
Egress
The line most teams never see until it dominates the bill. Data leaving the cloud — to users, to a CDN, to a third-party service — is priced per gigabyte, and SaaS products ship a lot of gigabytes.
Managed-service premium
A managed PostgreSQL, Redis or message broker costs a multiple of the same software on a plain VM. Sometimes that multiple buys you something. Often it buys you a dashboard you don't look at.
The quiet extras
NAT gateways, load balancers per environment, snapshot storage that nobody prunes, premium support plans, cross-zone transfer. Individually small; together they are routinely a third of the bill.
The numbers, stated honestly
We ran this on ourselves first. Moving Code Majesty's internal SaaS template off a cloud-native scaffold onto right-sized infrastructure cut its hosting cost by 94% — from about $2,000 to $120 a month. That is our template, on infrastructure we chose for it, and we don't present it as a client result.
Across client migrations the range we see is 60–90%, and where a project lands in that range is almost entirely a function of how much of the old bill was egress and managed-service premium. The full line-item comparison is in AWS vs Azure vs Hetzner: monthly SaaS hosting cost, and the reasoning behind our own move is in why we left the hyperscalers.
If your bill is small, the review will say so and you'll have spent $80 to confirm it. The engagement only makes sense when the numbers do.
The trade-offs nobody puts on the landing page
Cheaper hosting is only a win if it stays reliable. These are the things that decide that.
You take on more operations
Right-sized infrastructure on a provider like Hetzner means you own backups, patching and failover. For some teams that is a few hours a month and an obvious win. For others it is a role they don't have. We will tell you which one you are.
Compliance and region constraints are real
If your customers require a specific certification, data residency, or a provider their procurement already approved, the cheapest option may not be an option. We check this before we talk about numbers.
Some managed services are worth the premium
If a managed service is doing work your team would otherwise do badly, keep it. The goal is a smaller bill for the same reliability — not a smaller bill with a pager attached.
How it works
- Book the $80 session and share a recent bill export (or just screen-share it on the call).
- Line-item walkthrough with a senior engineer: compute, egress, managed services, the extras — and what each one is actually buying you.
- A straight recommendation: fix it in place, move it, or leave it alone. With numbers.
- If a migration is worth it, it runs as sprint-based work from $4,800, scoped from what we found. The session counts toward it.
Questions people ask about hosting cost reviews
How much can we realistically save?
Across client migrations we've run, the range is 60–90%, and where a project lands depends almost entirely on how much of the old bill was egress and managed-service premium. Our own internal SaaS template went from about $2,000 to $120 a month — a 94% drop — but that is our template on infrastructure we chose for it, not a client result, and we don't quote it as one.
What do I get from the $80 session?
A line-item walkthrough of your current bill with a senior engineer, the three to five items that are driving it, an honest view on whether a migration is worth doing at all, and — if it is — a rough shape of the work. You leave with numbers you can take to whoever signs off, whether or not you proceed with us.
Do you only recommend moving to Hetzner?
No. Sometimes the right answer is staying on AWS or Azure and fixing the sizing, egress and managed-service choices that are inflating the bill. We've published our own cost comparison and our reasons for moving our template, but the recommendation for your workload comes from your bill, not ours.
What does a migration cost if we go ahead?
Migrations run as sprint-based work from $4,800 per two-week sprint, scoped after the review. The $80 session counts toward it if you proceed. Most single-product SaaS migrations we've done fit in two to four sprints, but that depends on how much managed-service coupling has to be unwound.
Want to know what you're actually paying for?
One hour with a senior .NET engineer, line by line through your bill. $80, no commitment, and an honest answer even if that answer is 'stay where you are'.
Book the $80 Review