Our price doesn't change when your traffic does.

Traffic is the one input you do not control. A launch lands, a story gets picked up, a slow month goes slower. On your own hardware, none of that reaches the invoice, because the invoice was written before any of it happened: one number, agreed up front, the same at the end of the month as at the start.

A metered cloud cannot make that promise. Not because it refuses to. Because its billing is built per unit of usage, and a per-unit bill has to follow usage up and down. That is the difference this post walks through: what a usage-tracked bill does to a budget, why the tracking is built in, and what the same bill reads like with the meter taken out.

The line item you cannot budget for

Open last month's invoice. The compute line you can more or less predict. The trouble is everything underneath it: egress per gigabyte, a support tier billed monthly, and the one that ruins the spreadsheet, burst and overage. That last line has no number until it has already happened.

You cannot budget for a number you only see after the fact. A metered bill is built that way: legible enough to approve, open-ended by construction.

Why a cloud cannot quote you a flat number

Metering, egress fees, support tiers, per-core licensing: each is a unit of counting. A per-unit business cannot hand you a flat number, because a flat number means the counting stops.

So we deleted the meter. Not softened it, not capped it. Deleted it. When you own the machine, there is nothing left to measure. Here is the same bill, ruled twice.

What "€0 burst" actually means

Burst headroom on owned hardware costs nothing because it is not a product. It is the empty capacity already sitting in the box you paid for. Your traffic spikes, the spike uses cores that were always yours, and nothing counts it, because nothing is watching for something to charge.

This only works because the machine is single-tenant. On a public cloud you are renting a time-slice of a shared computer. On bare metal your cores are your cores, every day: no hypervisor schedules them against a neighbour's, so steal time is not a line on your graphs.

The number a CFO can put on a forecast

The reference build starts at €500 a month, and the number is agreed before the month starts. That is not a promotion, it is the absence of a meter. A CFO can put it on a forecast, because there is no overage line waiting to move it.

Fixed pricing is not us being generous. It is what pricing looks like once the thing you are paying for is a machine and not a meter. The forecasting tool you always wanted was never a better dashboard. It was a bill that holds still.

The catch we'll say out loud

If your load is genuinely elastic, spiky in ways you cannot predict, scaling from zero to enormous and back inside a day, then a public cloud may be the right tool and we will tell you so. Owning hardware suits workloads with a real floor: steady bases, predictable peaks, growth you can see coming.

Our €500 floor is a filter, on purpose. It sorts out the workloads that genuinely want a meter from the ones that were only ever paying for one. Most of what reaches us turns out to be the second kind. Some is the first, and for that we say so and send you on your way.

Send us your cloud bill. We will show you the same lines with the meter removed. No sales pitch, just math. Then run the wizard and see the number that does not move.