Compare AWS, Cloudflare, Hetzner, and DigitalOcean for your specific workload. Find where you're overpaying.
AWS charges for compute, bandwidth egress, storage, requests, and dozens of ancillary services that add up invisibly. A simple API running on a t3.medium costs $30–40/month on AWS but $5/month on Hetzner with identical specs. The trade-off is AWS's global infrastructure and managed services — worth it at scale, often overkill early.
Cloudflare Workers runs your code at the edge globally for $5/month (100M requests included) — vs. maintaining a server in one region. For read-heavy APIs, edge computing often outperforms traditional servers at a fraction of the cost. The limitation is execution time (50ms CPU per request) and no persistent storage without D1 or KV.
Lower infra cost is useful only if you can translate the savings into clearer founder metrics and a stronger operating story.
After infrastructure optimization, the next founder question is usually runway, capital efficiency, and how those numbers look in a pitch or planning deck.