Running everything on two clouds doubles cost and halves velocity. The realistic play: Docker + Postgres + S3-compatible storage keep ~90% of your stack portable, business logic stays out of proprietary glue, and infrastructure as code makes the exit real instead of theoretical.
Most startup cloud bills hide 30–60% waste: oversized instances, zombie resources, unmanaged storage, and egress surprises. Here are the seven fixes we apply in cost audits, ordered by effort — most are done in a day each.
Under 50,000 users, a single team, and no compliance-driven isolation requirements? You don't need Kubernetes. A VM with Docker Compose runs the same workload at a tenth of the operational cost. Here's the honest decision test.
We deploy client projects on both Vercel and Hetzner. Here's a real cost comparison — with actual numbers from production workloads — and a framework for choosing between them.
Only 4% of global cloud capacity is European-owned. The US CLOUD Act undermines data sovereignty. Here's our complete production stack built entirely on European providers.
