Introduction

We priced the same production workload three ways: Heroku, Railway, and raw cloud with Squark on top. The workload: a web API, two background workers, Postgres, and Redis, at moderate but real traffic.

Where platform pricing bends

Platform-hosted PaaS pricing is linear in things that shouldn’t be linear — dynos, seats, add-on tiers. Compute you could buy for cents is resold in bundles, and managed Postgres at scale often costs more than the compute running your app.

The markup buys real convenience at small scale. The problem is the curve: what’s a rounding error at $100 a month becomes the biggest line item at $5,000.

The BYOC math

Running in your own account means paying cloud list price — or your negotiated discount — for compute, and a flat control-plane fee for Squark. Marketplace add-ons like Postgres and Redis run as workloads in your cluster, so there is no per-add-on pricing at all.

In our comparison the crossover came early: once the workload outgrew hobby tiers, BYOC ran meaningfully cheaper — before committed-use discounts, which only widen the gap.

The takeaway

If your platform bill is under a few hundred dollars, stay put — convenience is winning. Past that, you’re paying a platform tax on every request, and it compounds.