When CFOs ask why we win against the hyperscalers, the question often gets framed as a unit-price comparison: dollars per vCPU-hour, dollars per GB-month. Those are real numbers, but they aren’t where the TCO gap lives.
The gap lives in four places. Each one is invisible on the rate card and impossible to plan around without first-party knowledge of how the bill actually composes itself.
1. Egress
A typical regulated customer running hybrid moves 30–80 TB out of their cloud per month — backups, replication, analytics extracts, customer file delivery. Hyperscaler egress out of an AU region to the open internet runs about $0.114 / GB after the first 100 GB. At 50 TB that’s around $5,700 per month. Amaze egress is $0.01 / GB — about $500 for the same volume.
2. FX
US-denominated bills compound a quiet 5–8% drift over a year because every billing cycle prices at spot. Amaze contracts and invoices in AUD; the price you sign for is the price you pay.
3. Support
Premium support on a hyperscaler is a percentage of spend. At meaningful scale it’s a six-figure line item. Amaze includes Australian on-call engineers in the platform price.
4. Regional premium
AU regions on AWS and Azure are priced higher than US regions because they can be. Amaze prices to Australian operating costs, not to whatever the market will bear.
Stack the four together and the difference is rarely less than 25%, often more. The unit price was never the point.
