Cloud costs
What the machines cost, next to the managed services.
Prices below are the clouds’ public on-demand prices for one reference cluster. They show what runs under a prty cluster and what the cloud’s own managed PostgreSQL costs for the same size. They are not prty’s price.
We have not set prty’s price. Access is by invitation and the terms are agreed one to one: write to contact@prty.cloud. The table shows the cloud bill, which is part of what a prty cluster costs; it does not show what you would pay us.
The reference cluster
2 vCPU, 8 GiB RAM, 100 GiB of data, high availability across zones. For prty on AWS that is two data machines, a small arbiter machine, and a disk of the stated size on each data machine plus an 8 GiB system disk on each of the three. A month is 730 hours. Backups, snapshots, network traffic and the shared servers that run prty’s control plane are not included on either side.
Monthly cost
| Cloud and region | Machines under a prty cluster | The cloud’s own managed PostgreSQL | Machines vs managed |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS, US East (N. Virginia) | $165.67 | $282.88RDS Multi-AZ | 41% less |
| AWS, EU (Frankfurt) | $197.98 | $336.92RDS Multi-AZ | 41% less |
| Google Cloud, Iowa (us-central1) | not availablethe same machines would cost $170.31 | $236.36Cloud SQL HA | n/a |
Prices read on 2026-10-17 from the sources at the bottom of the page. “Managed PostgreSQL” is Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL (db.m6i.large, a Multi-AZ DB instance with gp3 storage) on AWS and Cloud SQL for PostgreSQL (Enterprise edition, high availability, SSD storage) on Google Cloud. The three rows use different regions; Google’s Frankfurt prices are not in this table, so there is no like-for-like Europe row for Google.
How to read it
- The machines under a prty cluster cost less than the managed service on AWS, for the same compute and disk. That gap is where the people and the software of any managed service are paid for, ours included. It does not tell you what we charge.
- The managed services include things prty does not have yet. RDS and Cloud SQL come with automated backups and point-in-time recovery, and encrypted connections. Ours are not built (roadmap). Compare those prices as machines versus a finished product, not as equals.
- Google Cloud: prty does not run there. The figure shown is only what the same machines would cost on Compute Engine, so you can see the two clouds side by side.
- Where the managed services are stronger: their availability commitments are published and backed by credits (reliability). Ours are objectives for now.
Unit prices used
| Unit prices (on demand, USD) | Data VM (2 vCPU, 8 GiB) | Arbiter VM | Disk | Managed PostgreSQL |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AWS US East (N. Virginia) | m6i.large: $0.096/h | t3.micro: $0.0104/h | gp3: $0.08/GiB-month | $0.356/h + $0.23/GiB-month |
| AWS EU (Frankfurt) | m6i.large: $0.115/h | t3.micro: $0.012/h | gp3: $0.0952/GiB-month | $0.424/h + $0.274/GiB-month |
| Google Cloud Iowa (us-central1) | n2-standard-2: $0.097118/h | e2-micro: $0.008376428/h | Balanced Persistent Disk: $0.1/GiB-month | $0.0826/vCPU-h + $0.014/GiB-h + $0.34/GiB-month (HA rates) |
The prty column of the monthly table is 2 × data VM + 1 × arbiter VM, plus 2 × the data disk and 3 × an 8 GiB system disk, at these rates. The managed column is the hourly instance price plus storage (RDS: $/GiB-month for Multi-AZ; Cloud SQL: 2 vCPU and 8 GiB at the HA rates, plus HA SSD storage).
What would change these numbers
- Commitments. One- and three-year commitments lower both sides’ machine prices by a large margin on both clouds. We compared on-demand only, because that is the same for everyone.
- Size. Bigger machines make the storage line smaller in proportion; the shape of the comparison holds, the percentages move.
- A second replica. A cluster with two data replicas and no arbiter (designed, not built) costs another data machine and disk in place of the small arbiter.
- Data transfer, backups and the control plane are the cost lines we left out; each is real.
Sources
- AWS Price List API (service codes AmazonEC2 and AmazonRDS), on-demand terms effective 2026-10-01
- Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL pricing
- Amazon EC2 on-demand pricing
- Amazon EBS pricing
- Cloud SQL pricing
- Compute Engine general-purpose machine type pricing
- Compute Engine disk pricing
AWS figures came from the AWS Price List API (on-demand terms effective 2026-10-01); Google Cloud figures from the pricing pages listed, which show the Iowa region first. Prices are in US dollars and change; the number to trust is the provider’s page on the day you decide.