The Canyon Review· 2 min
Self-hosted observability stacks, ranked by total weekend cost
Grafana LGTM, VictoriaMetrics, SigNoz, Zabbix and Netdata ranked for teams leaving the Datadog bill behind. Weekends counted honestly.
Rankings
27 entries
· 2 min
Getting traffic into your self-hosted box, ranked
Cloudflare Tunnel, Tailscale, ngrok and plain WireGuard ranked for exposing homelab and small-team services without opening port 443 to the world.
· 1 min
pgvector vs. the dedicated vector databases, priced
For most teams the vector database is a Postgres extension you already have. The price check, the crossover point, and who should actually pay for dedicated.
· 2 min
Email APIs, ranked by deliverability per dollar
SES, Postmark, Resend and Mailgun ranked for transactional email. What you pay per thousand sends and what lands in inboxes.
· 2 min
Terraform alternatives, ranked two licenses later
OpenTofu, Pulumi, CDK and clicking around the console, ranked for infrastructure-as-code after the BSL era settled.
· 2 min
Auth providers, priced at the MAU cliff
Auth0, Clerk, Supabase Auth, Cognito, FusionAuth and Keycloak priced at 1k, 10k and 100k monthly active users. The cliffs are the story.
· 2 min
Object storage price math, with the egress included this time
S3, R2, B2 and GCS priced on a real workload including the egress bill vendors hope you'll forget. One clear winner for serving files.
· 2 min
Self-hosted search, ranked by time to first result
Typesense, Meilisearch, OpenSearch and Postgres full-text ranked for product search under a million documents.
· 2 min
Secrets managers, compared without the theater
Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, Doppler, Infisical and SOPS compared for small teams. What rotation actually costs and who needs it.
· 2 min
Feature flag platforms, ranked before you overbuy
LaunchDarkly, PostHog, Flagsmith, Unleash and a config file, ranked for teams under twenty engineers. Most of you need less than you think.
· 2 min
CDN pricing, torn down to cents per gigabyte
Cloudflare, CloudFront, Fastly and Bunny priced on the same 10 TB month. The per-GB spread is wider than most vendor comparisons admit.
· 2 min
Message queues, ranked for teams that just need a queue
SQS, RabbitMQ, NATS, Kafka and Redis Streams ranked for ordinary background work. Licensing drama included at no extra charge.
· 2 min
The observability bill, torn down line by line
Where Datadog, Grafana Cloud and self-hosted stacks actually charge you. Hosts, custom metrics, ingest and the cardinality trap, priced.
· 2 min
Error tracking, ranked by signal per dollar
Sentry, Honeybadger, Rollbar, Bugsnag and GlitchTip ranked for a small team that wants stack traces, not a data platform.
· 2 min
Serverless databases, ranked by cold honesty
Neon, PlanetScale, Turso, DynamoDB and Cloudflare D1 ranked on what serverless pricing actually does to a normal app's bill.
· 1 min
If the pricing needs a calculator, budget for the calculator
A one-pager on the strongest pricing signal we know.
· 1 min
Your benchmark box is lying to you
Burstable instances hand out CPU credits, your ten-minute benchmark spends them, and the numbers you shipped to the team are fiction. The five-minute fix.
· 1 min
We benched five ways to build a portfolio site
Static generators, builders and WordPress, timed on throttled mobile. The gap between first and last place is the whole hiring impression.
· 2 min
Managed Postgres, ranked by what you actually pay
Five managed Postgres providers ranked for a small production app. Real monthly prices, the branching gimmicks that matter, and the one to skip.
· 2 min
Static hosting shootout, free tiers included
Cloudflare Pages, Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages and an S3 bucket, ranked for actually-static sites. Bandwidth fine print exposed.
· 2 min
The middle tier is usually the right tier
Vendors design three-tier pricing around one tier they want you in and two decoys. The pattern, the exceptions, and how to check in five minutes.
· 3 min
Kubernetes distributions for small teams, ranked by regret
k3s, Talos, k0s, MicroK8s and managed EKS ranked for teams of ten or fewer. Scored on overhead, upgrade pain and time to first useful deploy.
· 2 min
A free tier is a pricing page, not a product
The three kinds of free tier, how to tell which one you are holding, and the graduation cliff that turns $0 into the most expensive plan we track.
· 1 min
Five Postgres extensions we would install again, ranked
The shortlist that survives contact with production. pg_stat_statements first, and it is not close.
· 2 min
How we score things (and why "contact sales" costs you points)
The rubric behind every ranking on this site, published so you can argue with it. Ops burden 40%, real cost 30%, fit 20%, tooling 10%.
· 2 min
The SSO tax, priced and scored
Single sign-on regularly costs 2x to 4x the base plan, and one vendor wants 41x. What the wall of shame documents, and how to score it in procurement.
· 2 min
CI providers, priced on three real repos
GitHub Actions, GitLab, CircleCI and Buildkite priced against the same three repositories. The per-minute math nobody does before picking.