Show HN: The safe-choice tax – what the vendor nobody gets fired for costs
svpremium.dev
svpremium.dev
Hi HN, I built https://svpremium.dev after two migrations cut our infrastructure bills far more than I expected.
DNS: ~$150K → ~$5K/year. We’d used NS1 for years, initially for advanced features like filter chains. As we moved our infrastructure to anycast, we ended up mostly using basic DNS and geo routing. But we were still on an annual, prepaid contract sized for peak capacity. Trying to right-size it and remove features only got the quote down to around $100K. We moved to Route 53; our expected bill is around $5K/year.
Images: ~90% cheaper. Devs picked imgix because it was easy and free to try and integrate. As our user-generated content grew, so did the bill: under its old pricing, unique origin images accounted for about 80% of the cost. Moving to Bunny eliminated that charge and reduced bandwidth costs, cutting the total by roughly 90%.
Servers: Of course, everyone knows that hyperscalers (AWS/GCP/Azure) $$$ > DigitalOcean/Vultr $$ > Hetzner $
What vendors am I missing? And where is the familiar, expensive choice worth the premium - and why?
The concept of the website is basically showing the Sillicon Valley / Big Tech / Enterprise premium you're paying for when there's plenty more of options.